Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Yes. It isn’t ideal, but I don’t know what else to do now.”

  “What about the friends who’ve been helping us?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve already gotten them in enough trouble,” she said grimly. “That’s probably how these people found us.”

  “How did you know they weren’t just someone hanging around?”

  “By how they were hanging around.”

  He regarded her. “You know those kinds of people.”

  “All my life.”

  He looked at her curiously. It had to have been an odd life. The sons of top politicians in China were called princelings. Very privileged, but also locked inside a modern version of the Forbidden City. A daughter would be princessling, a little princess. Heirs to the throne. But then came dynastic succession.

  Their little ferry hummed around the corner of the light-spangled mountain that bulked across the channel from their little island. Skyscrapers were pillars of light lining the shore, also studding the entire slope from the shore to the black peaks above. A black mountain, jammed with towers of white light. Then as they rounded the curve of this lit mountain rising from the black sea, they could see farther to the east, and along this slope the lit skyscrapers were simply everywhere. They filled every space, they defined the shape of the city. The dark mountain bulked above this dense forest of lit skyscrapers, but the millions of lights of the city dominated all. Black glassy water lay under the boat, squiggling with white reflections. Ahead of them the glossy water separated two enormous white fields of skyscrapers.

  “This is Hong Kong?”

  “Yes. Kowloon to the left, Hong Kong island to the right. That’s Central district on the right, where we’re headed.”

  “Wow,” Fred said.

  Their boat slowed, then glugged in toward a giant ferry terminal, sticking out into the water like an aircraft carrier. To the left of the terminal soared an enormous Ferris wheel, as bright with white lights as any of the skyscrapers. Across the bay, in Kowloon, one building stood twice as tall and four times as thick as any of the others, a true monster. Words of white light in English and Chinese characters crawled up its side in a continuous vertical light show. Advertisements, apparently.

  They got off their boat and joined a crowd. Again Qi led the way, through a complex multilevel terminal, then onto a glassed-in bridge over the highway backing the terminal. She threaded them through several gold-and-glass malls, each connected to the next by hallways, all of them multistory, all crisscrossed with escalators and broad staircases. All the stores in these malls appeared to be jewelry stores, which struck Fred as bizarre. He had never seen anything like it, and was completely lost, and it seemed to him that without some fairly extensive previous experience Qi should be lost too. But she hauled him through the three-dimensional maze without hesitation, making turns and taking escalators as if certain of her way. Giant room after giant room, all filled with shoppers, or rather what appeared to be people on their way somewhere else. These malls were being used as pedestrian corridors. Maybe better to think of them as giant hallways. He was stunned by all the lights, all the gleaming surfaces, all the mazelike rooms.

  They came out of one mall into a park filled with tropical trees. Then past a large caged-in aviary, in which Fred saw a flash or two of color, flitting under spotlights that illuminated a few parts of it. Then onto an outdoor escalator that cut straight up through a steeper part of the city. This long escalator led to the bottom of another escalator, rising through dense neighborhoods in which the buildings got lower the higher they rose. The escalators had long skinny tilted roofs covering them, no doubt to protect them from rain. Most of the people on the escalators stood to the right, and sometimes Qi stood with them; other times she hurried up the left side, and Fred followed her.

  When they reached the top of the uppermost one, she turned left on a narrow street and began hiking up a street traversing the slope. By now they were both sweating from her haste in walking up so many escalator steps. It was warm and humid, and smelled like the tropics; it didn’t smell like a city. From time to time Qi stopped to catch her breath.

  “Do we have to hurry like this?” he asked her.

  She gave him a look. “I want to get off the streets as soon as possible.”

  “Your friend is up here?”

  “Yes!”

  She led him up a switchbacking route, one small lane after another. The buildings lining these narrow alleyways were reduced in size to cubical things two or three stories tall, made of concrete, and sometimes wood. An older district. Then as they rose higher the roads angled up slopes covered more by trees than by buildings, and what buildings there were looked like houses with wooden shingles. An old residential area, no doubt very expensive. The hill was so steep that its side had been concreted over in most places, presumably to keep rain from sluicing its soil down onto the streets. Each tree on these concrete slopes had a hole of its own in the tilted concrete. Runnels incised into the concrete of the slope shot vertically into deep culverts on the streets’ uphill sides.

  Eventually they came to a big cube of a building, where a knot of roads converged. This giant concrete cube was set right on the main ridge of the city’s backing mountain, in a low point between two broad peaks. The city-facing side of the cube served as the upper terminus of a little cog railway, which ran up into the building at what looked like a forty-five-degree angle.

  “Inside,” Qi said, and she pulled Fred through a doorway into the big cube, past the cog railway terminal and farther inside. Four floors of balconies, all filled with open-walled shops, looked down into a big empty central space. The shops sold tourist trinkets and T-shirts. Qi hurried up stairs rising against one wall, then pulled Fred into one open-fronted shop of trinkets that was already closed for the night. The entire cube was closing, it appeared. Qi pushed open a door at the back of the shop and looked inside, nodded, gestured around them at the shop.

  “We can spend the night here.”

  She blew her hair away from her eyes, wiped her brow. She was still huffing and puffing. They looked around the little shop they were in, full of knickknacks and scarves and postcards. Protect us now, little Chinese goddesses, Fred thought as he stared at a row of them. Qi was checking for security cameras and found none aimed at the back of the store, where there was also a little toilet room.

  “You’ve been here before?” Fred asked.

  “Yes, I saw this place a long time ago. A woman selling stuff here let me use this bathroom, and I remembered it.”

  They sat down on the floor, put their backs against the wall. The lights went off, and after a while a pair of security guards made a cursory circle around each floor, chatting as they went. Then it was silent. Qi got up and made a bed and pillow out of scarves, and lay on her side and fell asleep. Fred tried to get comfortable, but soon after falling into a doze, he woke up feeling sick. Then a wave of nausea passed through him, causing sweat to pop from every pore. He quickly staggered into the little bathroom and kneeled over the toilet and threw up in it, flushing it time after time to reduce the smell. Then he felt Qi’s hand on his forehead, holding his head up as his body convulsed, her other hand pressed against his back. After each spasm of throwing up, she handed him lengths of toilet paper to wipe his face with. This repeated a few times. For a while the clenching in his gut relented, and then he began the stage of dry heaves, his body still desperately trying to vomit up something that wasn’t there anymore. He felt truly wretched as he coughed up spittle and chyme and whatever else might remain down there. Qi stayed with him throughout the ordeal. Later, after he seemed done, and had crawled back out to their nest on the shop floor, she sat by him and wiped his face clean with a scarf wetted from a water bottle. She handed him a roll of mints she had found on the counter of the shop in a stack of candies for sale. He popped one into his mouth against a cheek, tentatively swallowed a few times.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I guess I ate something that disagreed w
ith me.”

  “Apparently so. Although I feel okay, and I ate the same stuff. But who knows. My appetite has been crazy.”

  “No morning sickness?”

  “Not now. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Shaky. But I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up anymore.”

  “We have quite a few hours to go before they open this place. Try to sleep.”

  He tried, failed; but then woke up, feeling queasy. Then slid under again.

  When he woke again he felt parched, but Qi had found him a bottle of lemonade from a cooler in the corner of the shop. The big windows on the upper floor of the cube showed dawn was coming.

  “There’s an awkward time coming, maybe,” Qi said. “Between when the shopkeepers arrive and when the first train of tourists gets here. I’d like to keep hiding and only come out when the tourists get here, then mingle with them and leave. So I don’t think we can stay in this shop. But I think there must be public restrooms somewhere in here, and maybe we can just hide in a stall in one. It should only be for an hour or less.”

  “And if I get sick again we’ll be in the right place,” Fred offered weakly.

  She nodded with a little smile and led him through the darkness down the stairs, looking around for security cameras. Then into a ladies’ room, where they sat down on the floor and waited. Noises of people came from outside, so they crammed into a stall together, ready to stand on the toilet if anyone came in; no one did. Finally they heard, or possibly felt, the first train of the day leave the station, and ten minutes later the first one from below was hauled in with a clanking sound. Then the noises of people filtered into their hideout. Qi took a look out the door, and when she gave the all clear, Fred followed her.

  Qi took him by the hand and led him after that, and he followed her, hoping not to have to think. He was surprised when Qi handed him a wrapped pastry she had taken from their shop. “I have some candy bars too, if you feel like eating.”

  “Thanks.” He felt weak and shaky, possibly with hunger, although he didn’t feel hungry. Far from it; he felt dreadful.

  Then Qi became very absorbed in trying to find an exit from the cube. The only doors they could find led them either into the cog railway’s terminal, or into some kind of tourist trap, it looked like a wax museum, but it was hard to tell, as she kept tugging him past its entry and cursing under her breath. “Damn this place!” she said at one point. “They don’t want you to leave! They want you to buy more of their crap and then take the train back down!”

  “Looks like it.”

  They descended stairs that led only to an emergency exit, with ALARM WILL SOUND marking its door. She cursed again, they ascended the stairs, took another narrow passageway that led to different stairs. They descended again, and here as luck would have it a man was unlocking the exit door from the outside. As he opened it to come in, Qi thanked him in Chinese and hustled Fred out and away. They found themselves standing on a little plaza between the big concrete cube and a big knot of tourist shops. One of the mountaintop’s ridge roads edged this plaza. Sunny morning, some overcast clouds, a slight breeze.

  Qi led him into a coffee shop and ordered coffee for herself, and a pastry; Fred had another lemonade, feeling parched and unsteady.

  Then they were back out onto the high plaza, looking around. It was about nine in the morning, sun up over the ridge of the mountain rising to the east of them. A few tourists were wandering the plaza. Westward on the broad ridge one road sloped up to the right, another down to the left. A little botanical garden flanked the left side of the road headed uphill, and on the other side of that road stood a large apartment complex, rising over a tall wall that guarded it from the street. The north-facing apartments in this complex would have spectacular views over the city. The south slope of the ridge was green, nothing but treetops falling sharply away, and a view out to sea, which again was as smooth as a lake, a hazy blue in the morning sun.

  “Is this it?” Fred said, looking up at the building.

  “Yes.” She was checking out the street, looking back and forth.

  “Have you been here before?”

  “No.”

  That made him uneasy, but there was nothing he could do but follow her and hope for the best. They walked across the little plaza and up the road toward the luxury apartments’ gated driveway.

  She stopped all of a sudden and turned into Fred. Again she hugged him hard, and he felt her pregnant belly against him.

  “They’re here too,” she muttered.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I know them,” she said.

  “You mean individually? You know them in particular?”

  “No no.” She knocked her forehead against his collarbone. “It’s them though, believe me. I know them when I see them.”

  “I believe you. But how could they know you would come here?”

  “They know Ella and I were at school together. It must be that. They’re guarding anywhere I might go.”

  “Okay, let’s just walk it back here. Hold on to me, come on.”

  “We can’t go back down into the city the way we came up.”

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t want to. There’s too many cameras, too many eyes.”

  Fred looked around. “Can you climb?”

  “No. Can you?”

  “A little.” His brother had once taken him out to a bouldering site and taught him the basic rope techniques and moves, and the following week they had climbed a short and easy wall together, his brother leading every pitch. This was another of his brother’s attempts to get him out of his head, but the experience had not been to Fred’s liking. Exposure, a climbers’ term, was a partial description; they didn’t say what the exposure was to, which turned out to be death by falling. Fred had felt that was going too far in the search for something interesting. When you were stunned by the fact that a fermion rotated 720 degrees before returning to its original position, you did not need to hang by your fingers and toes from a cliff to get your thrills. But the whole experience had been etched on his mind quite forcefully.

  “Can we do it?” she asked, seeing his uncertainty.

  “I don’t know. But if it doesn’t get too steep, I think so.”

  “Okay then. Let’s do it.”

  They hurried as casually as they could back to the intersection of roads in the low point on the ridge, then walked down the lower road that also headed west. As soon as they were out of the sight of the plaza and the upper road, Fred peered over the south side of the road and gulped at the steepness: treetops dropped swiftly away, and the sea was a long way down and yet not very far off. He continued along the road, hoping for a lessening of the slope’s angle, while trying also to adjust to the sudden reversal of roles. Now he was leading her, and needed to choose a good way—a good way to get a pregnant woman who was not a climber down a slope that looked to be dropping at an angle of at least forty-five degrees, and was concreted over in many places! It was hard to say whether the concrete was an advantage or disadvantage. It might be less slippery. On the other hand if they did slip it would be disastrous. The many trees covering the slope, and the open cups of concrete-rimmed dirt they emerged from, would probably be his best chance of finding good holds.

  They passed a stream that coursed through a tunnel under the road, its pitch so steep that below the road it became a waterfall. That was certainly not the way down, and he continued anxiously on, feeling the weakness in him from the night’s vomiting. He was a little light-headed.

  Then the road took a turn out and around a bump in the hill. Here the slope below them was a little bit of a buttress. Just past the broad nose of this buttress the slope was less steep than what they had passed so far, and more covered with trees. “Okay, over we go,” he said to her, and helped her over the road’s low guardrail.

  They descended in short sideways steps. Quickly they found themselves on a slope so steep that they had to sit down, then slide very
slowly down on their butts. The concrete facing that covered the hill was so rough they couldn’t slip down it even if they wanted to, which was reassuring. Fred went first and led her from tree to tree. They held on to tree trunks, and put their shoes against the rims of the tree holes in the concrete, and sometimes against each other. Mostly this meant Qi put her foot against Fred from above, to ease herself down to him. The angle of the slope was proving to be laid-back enough to allow them to stay stuck to it. He found he couldn’t estimate the angle very well—possibly thirty-five degrees, but who knew really. Angle of repose was thirty-two degrees, he seemed to recall, but what kind of repose? A round ball would roll down any incline, so maybe they meant a cube or something. In practical terms, it was as steep as it could be and them still stick to it.

  Almost immediately they were down the slope far enough that they couldn’t see the road above, and Fred felt sure they would not be visible from it either. That being the case, they could slow down and take it more carefully, so he did that. Qi looked scared but resolute, her lips clamped to a white line, her eyes fixed on her footwork. She could not fall, so she would not: this was what her expression said. She would stay stuck in one spot forever if that was what it took—get rescued by climbers or helicopters, go to prison—but no falling.

  Fred tried to get a better view down. It wasn’t possible to see far through the trees. If the slope got steeper than what they were on now, they would be in big trouble. Even as it was he was not happy with the angle. Any slip that created any momentum and the results would be awful.

  He kept going first, and when possible kept one hand free to reach up and hold her hand or foot, knee or elbow. Sometimes he reached up and gripped her wrist. She used him as a foothold without hesitation or compunction. Every few moves they had to put their butts to the slope, or sometimes their knees, and the occasional brief scraping slide downward hurt even through clothes. He tried to calculate how long it was going to take them to descend, but didn’t know enough to do it. He had no idea if there was another road on this side of the mountain, or how far down the slope it might be if there was one. They still couldn’t see far through the broad leaves of the trees, in any direction. It seemed like this island was so thoroughly urbanized that there would have to be a road down there somewhere, but he didn’t really know.