Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Everything about it was old and battered. A slow train, a train that had carried millions of people millions of kilometers, still in service despite all. A train for poor people. They passed through a car of open seats, then crossed into the next car, which featured individual sleeper compartments, each so narrow that people turned sideways to slip through their doorways. Qi held her wristpad to one of these, and when the door clicked she pushed it in and turned to squeeze through. Fred followed her. Inside, beyond the empty space needed for the door to open, a thin low bed filled the whole of the compartment, except for a narrow slot leading to the window, where two short seats faced each other. A minimalist space, but compared to what he had seen elsewhere on the train, luxurious.

  They sat down on the two seats, looked out the window. In the darkness it was hard to see anything but their reflections in the glass. That other couple looked tired and worried.

  “Seems like your friends got us through,” Fred said.

  “So far so good,” she said. “We’ll know after we get off.”

  “Will that be long?” he asked. Then, when she didn’t reply: “Are you sure you can’t tell me where we’re going?”

  “Shekou,” she said.

  He didn’t know where that was, which of course she knew would be the case.

  “I’m going to go to the dining car and get us some food,” she said. “You stay here till I get back, all right?”

  “All right.”

  While she was gone Fred began to get even more worried, which surprised him, as he had thought he was already maxed out in that regard. Nothing had gone right since Governor Chang had crumpled into his arms. This single shard of memory was preceded and followed by blank periods, then by blurry recollections of coming to and fading out. No question there were major gaps in his memory of his time on the moon. This he found frightening. The gaps—also what he could remember—both were bad. His inability to understand Chinese was bad. The absence of Americans coming to his aid had been bad. Food had been bad; gravity had been bad. Being moved suddenly from place to place, wearing shackles or strapped to a gurney; taken to spaces smaller even than this sleeper compartment: all that had been very bad. He began to shiver a little. It was still happening faster than he could take in, and he had to work hard to suppress an undertow of terror.

  Because this was always a little true for him, he was perhaps better at it than he might have been. Focus tightly on the moment; make an observation; make another observation; thus onward through day after day, as best he could manage. Now that habit of mind came in useful. And he saw also that being paired with Qi was not as bad as being a prisoner on the moon. She had appeared there out of nowhere, brought scowling into the room he had been held in, shouting something at her captors, scarcely aware he was there; and then things had changed. He had been led out of that room with her, and reunited with Ta Shu, and then sent home to Earth, and on arrival cast into this strange trip. Now he remembered the feel of her body as she hugged him, the smell of her hair. That glare of hers, worldly and knowing, hard with resolve, blazing with sudden fury. Interesting was not the right word for what was happening now; it was more than interesting, and worse. But not boring; and those rooms on the moon had been boring. Boring and terrifying both; he hadn’t known that combination was possible. Now he knew it was.

  He was hungry. Earth’s gravity pushed down hard. His ears were ringing with a slight buzzy ring, and he still felt stunned, and his hand when he extended it before him was quivering.

  Qi returned carrying boxes of Sichuan noodles with chunks of chicken in them. Also a few packets of almonds, and plastic bottles of water. They ate in silence, put the empty boxes on the floor.

  Qi sucked her chopsticks clean, inspected one, cracked it such that it split lengthwise. After that she worried the cracked end with her teeth until she had it reduced to a sharp point. A bamboo needle of sorts.

  “Okay,” she said, holding it out to Fred. “I need you to dig that chip out of me.”

  “What!”

  “You heard me.”

  “But with that?”

  “We don’t have anything better. I bought us toothbrushes and toothpaste, but they didn’t have any little knives or clippers for sale. So this will have to do.”

  “Where is it again?”

  “In my back. Right where I can’t reach it myself.”

  She pulled her blouse up and over her head, shocking him, and then lay facedown on the bed, and reached back and undid her bra. An ordinary human back, ribs and spine obvious, spine in a trough of muscle on both sides of it. She looked strong. Fred gulped.

  “It’s right here,” she said, and reached around and pointed. “Next to the spine, but in the muscle. To the left side, I think. There should be a little scar.” Lower down, her backbone rose up toward her bottom, still covered by her pants. “Come on, find it. It should be easy to feel. I don’t think it’s too far in there.”

  Fred clenched his teeth, steeled his nerve, and put his finger on her back where she had indicated. He rubbed the muscles to each side of her spine, pushing slightly. Her skin was smooth, as was the muscle under the skin.

  He felt a hard little bump over the muscle to the right side of her backbone. Down there in the dermis. Just the slightest discoloration over it, and a faint scar. Shorter than a little fingernail and not as wide. Luckily it was well away from her spine. No way did he want to be digging around near her spinal cord with a sharp stick.

  “It’ll hurt to get that out of you,” he told her.

  “I don’t care. It has to go. There are lots of security systems my friends can’t fix.”

  “What about the blood? It’ll probably bleed like crazy.”

  She held up a roll of toilet paper. “I took this from the toilet. When you’ve got it out, just keep wiping me till it stops bleeding.”

  “All right, if you say so.”

  “I do say so.”

  It turned out to be hard. The split bamboo of the chopstick was pointy but not that sharp, nor that rigid. What was wanted was a good knife, one with both a point and an edge. As it was he had to jab her a little, while not stabbing her deeper than was necessary, or getting near her spine. In the end he had to grab her skin and pull it to the side until the little bump was hard under the skin. He could feel her tense her back muscles to help him, which he found distracting. Her torso, her body, her lustrous skin, the curve of one breast still in its bra cup, squashed into the bed and sticking out to the side … Finally he just had to push the chopstick’s sharp point into her taut skin as hard as he could, at an angle away from her spine, and then, when it was at maximum pressure, smack the end of it with his free hand, harder and harder, trying to find the minimum poke that would actually break the skin.

  “Just do it!” she exclaimed, her face in profile against the pillow looking fierce, her little eyeteeth exposed and ready to bite something.

  So with an extra-sharp smack he punctured her skin, and she said “Ow!” and he had to start swabbing a trickle of blood out of her spinal trough, while also digging around in the wound he had made with the end of the chopstick, which caused her to curse violently, or so he assumed, as she was growling in Chinese, grimacing with eyes clamped shut. He suddenly became aware that she had reached back and was squeezing his knee as if to inflict an equivalent hurt on him, a pressure that he found comforting. He felt like he had fallen into one of his dreams of a quite frequent type, in which he had to perform something he didn’t know anything about, like surgery, as here. And yet it was also weirdly stimulating. Or maybe just intimate, yes, that was the right word. Fred had seldom been intimate with anybody, and he found it quite distracting.

  Then he saw one end of the chip there swimming in her blood, and was able to get the chopstick tip under it, then lever it up and pluck it out of her. It was somewhat like taking a tick out of a dog’s skin, a memory that came to him from the lost depths of his childhood.

  He put the bloody black pill in the pal
m of her hand, then focused on unrolling toilet paper and wiping the blood from her skin over and over, pressing hard with a little pad of it, pressing right on the tear in her skin until the toilet paper saturated and he replaced it with another pad, doing his best to keep blood from running into the trough of her spine.

  Eventually the bleeding slowed. She sat up, her back to him. He could see the side of her left breast, there under her loose bra, but she obviously didn’t care, and he tried not to either. He was a doctor of sorts, or at least a first responder: time to be medical! And he was good at seeing himself from just behind the moment.

  “When it stops completely,” he said, “I can make a pad of tissue and fit it under your bra strap. Then it might stay there like a bandage.”

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you.”

  She gestured, and after a moment he got what she meant; he put the toilet paper down and grabbed the two ends of her bra strap and pulled them in, hooked them together while she pulled the front of the bra down over her breasts and shrugged into it. After that he caught up on the blood flow, which was coagulating almost completely now. He made a pad of tissue to put in place when the time was right. The bleeding was definitely slowing down.

  “What are you going to do with the thing?” he asked her.

  “Get rid of it somewhere. Maybe put it in somebody’s stuff, let the watchers think I’m going somewhere else for a while.”

  “Maybe put it on some other train when we get off, or even when we stop at a station, if we do. If there’s a chance. Throw it on board some other train and it will look like you’re going somewhere else.”

  “Maybe so,” she said.

  Fred kept pressing a wad of toilet paper hard against the cut he had made in her. “How long will this trip take?”

  “All night. They let you sleep till morning in these compartments, if they arrive at the station in the middle of the night.”

  “But you’ll want to leave as soon as we stop?”

  “Yes. I think that will be morning anyway.”

  “It looks like it’s almost done coagulating. You’ll have to be careful for a while.”

  “Yes. Thanks for helping.”

  “Sure. Are you comfortable?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “What about, you know, you being pregnant and all? You were lying on your stomach.”

  “I could feel it.”

  “Do you feel the baby move in you?”

  “Maybe. My appetite’s been strange, but we were on the moon, so who knows what was what.”

  “Indeed.”

  For a while they sat there, feeling the train click and sway through the night. The slight vibration put them both aquiver, a tiny quiver that was always there under the rhythmic rocking of the train. It seemed to Fred like his thumb on her back might feel to Qi like something foreign and painful, and again the weird intimacy of what they were doing washed through him. What if the chip had been stuck in her butt! But no, it had to be put where she couldn’t reach it herself, of course. No, a very inappropriate thought.

  He sighed, and she glanced at him.

  “What?” she said.

  “Oh, nothing. I wish I knew what was going on.”

  She shook her head, stared at the wall. “It’s China,” she said. “Give up on that.”

  More trembling through the night. Eventually Fred had to say, “I think you’ve stopped bleeding,” and after that he placed a fresh wad of toilet paper into place under her bra, and she pulled on her shirt and was dressed again. Goodbye, hour of contact. Gone at the speed of an old train clicking through the night.

  They moved into the two seats again, facing each other, the black window beside them creating their transparent twins. Through their reflections the moonlit countryside flickered as it flowed. Lights here and there dotted the countryside, which appeared hilly and uncrowded, mysterious and moony.

  “Will this child of yours be the first one conceived on the moon?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”

  “So it’s dangerous?”

  “No one knows. Some people think so. But do you know the gibbons?”

  “The gibbons?”

  “There’s a group of gibbons being kept at a base up the libration zone. Too bad you didn’t see them, they’re great. I did some work with them, and I love them. Even on Earth they fly around their enclosures like crazy trapeze artists. On the moon, it’s just—” She waved a hand to indicate the inexpressible.

  “Out of this world,” Fred suggested.

  She smiled a little. “Yes. And the thing is, they’ve had their babies up there. Three or four generations now. And there haven’t been any problems that people have noticed.”

  “They might not be able to test them for, you know,” Fred ventured to say.

  She frowned at his presumption. “I know. But I’ve spent a lot of time with them, watching them, and …”

  “And they seem all right?”

  This was a game his brother used to make him play. His brother would start a sentence and stop midway through, then make Fred guess how to finish it. Fred had been terrible at it, but it had amused his brother, and there were worse ways to pass the time. And his mother liked it when they did it. A good exercise, she called it.

  “Yes,” Qi had said, and now he started listening to her again: “—hard to tell. No, this is a kind of experiment. I can’t deny that.” She looked up at his face and added sharply, as if contradicting him, “Of course I didn’t want to experiment with something like this! But I made a mistake. And I don’t want to end the pregnancy. I’m going to have the baby. And then we’ll see what we see. I’ll love it no matter what. Lots of moms have to bring up kids with problems.”

  Like mine, Fred thought. Not something to say; nor did he add, It didn’t look like it was that easy. After a while he did think to say, “Yes.” Then: “So you have friends where we’re going?”

  “Yes. That’s why we’re going there.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Tell me,” she said, “what happened to you on the moon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But what do you remember happening?”

  “There are gaps. When I was awake, I didn’t know what was going on. I had to deduce it from the questions I was asked. Someone said I almost died, and I believe it. I felt really sick. I’ve never felt that sick before. But instead of being another victim, I was a suspect.”

  She shrugged. “Sounds like you’re better off with me. At least for the time being.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Meaning maybe. But it was definitely interesting, sitting there in a night train across from her. She was holding in her hand the chip he had cut out of her. She was getting sleepy. Gravity was crushing them. She was stretching like a cat. She got up and lay on their narrow bed, her head toward him. Eventually she shifted up and used his thigh as her pillow, without asking him, her black hair spilling like shot silk over his legs. Asleep then, with one hand in an ex-thumb-sucker’s position, breathing deeply, with a little asthmatic wheeze.

  For now he was stuck with her. Or rather she was stuck with him! Traveling with a Westerner had to get her some unwanted extra attention, but she was doing it anyway. That was interesting. And all his life he had struggled to find things that were interesting. Quantum mechanics, yes, very interesting; but that particular source of interest had taken him far away from other people. He had lived at a remove, uncertain how to find other interesting things; and uncertain more generally, in part because of things people said to him that they seemed to think would help him. They hadn’t helped; possibly the reverse.

  Now, however, the world had become undeniably interesting. Even though it might be like getting slapped in the face to wake up, well, still—he was awake. Here they were, in a mystery. In a potentiality. A situation that was without question pretty interesting.

  In the gray of predawn the landscape out their window slid by, sh
ifting in quick stages from a classic Chinese ink-brush painting, in which washes of mist separated tree-lined lakes from jagged peaks, to an industrial wasteland fallen into ruin while still under construction. Construction cranes poked the gray night sky like giant gallows built to hang any surviving remnants of Nature. This bleak zone slid by for most of an hour, then the train slowed down. Fred nudged Qi and she sat up, rubbing her eyes.

  “Shekou?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t know.” She peered out the window. “I’ve never been there.”

  As the train slowed it vibrated and shuddered more than it had through the night. Qi moved to sit across from Fred and their knees bounced together and apart. The gray cityscape out the window was a jumble of concrete blocks, liberally spangled with what seemed to be semitropical foliage. That suggested their trip had been southward. Many of the buildings, both old and new, had curving facades. These curves and the greenery gave the city a certain ramshackle aplomb. A tall bamboo cluster reminded Fred of the moon, as did all the predawn grays.

  When the train stopped, Qi stood and led Fred down the crowded hall and off the train, then through the crowd on the platform. When she passed an open door on the train across the platform, she tossed her chip up into it with a casual offhand flip. Then they joined the flow of people leaving the station, passing through its tall gates without trouble.

  “If I have to, I’ll be telling people you were part of my host family when I went to school in America,” she told him as they hurried down a narrow street. “They won’t be surprised you don’t know Chinese. Thank you is xiexie.”

  “Shee shay?”

  “Close enough.”

  The curving streets in this part of the city were very narrow. The buildings flanking them, four or five stories tall, curved with the streets in a way that suggested they all had grown together. None of the buildings looked foursquare, and it didn’t seem like they could have been easy to build, given all the curves. It was as if the whole city had been twisted by immense gravitational waves and then frozen in place.