Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Let’s stop and rest for a while,” he said to her when they were both securely sitting in a skinny tree’s open bowl, feet against the concrete rim of the downhill side. They sat there, breathing hard at first, sweating freely in the humid air. Now he caught a glimpse of the ocean down there through the leaves. He guessed it was still at least a thousand feet below them.

  “Are there any roads down this way, do you know?” he asked.

  “I don’t. I’ve only been to Hong Kong a few times. As far as I know, people don’t come to this side very much. I think I remember hearing the city’s water comes from this side. There’s a reservoir or something. So people must come over here, right?”

  “I think so, yeah. But … Well, I guess we’ll figure it out when we get down there.”

  They sat there sweating. After a while they started down again. The concrete covering came to an end, and they found themselves on crumbling rock and scree and sand and dirt, quite a bit more slippery than the concrete had been, but also affording some places they could dig in with their shoes, also some knobs of hard rock to hold on to. Then this unclad slope got steeper, scaring Fred; but after a while it laid back a little, reassuring him. That repeated a few times. They took rests every fifteen or twenty minutes.

  A couple of hours passed like that. Then, legs shaking, palms bleeding, sweating so profusely their shirts were soaked, they saw through the trees a paved road crossing the slope below them. One moment they were looking down on broad green leaves as always, then there was a road. It traversed the slope almost horizontally, as far as they could tell from above.

  The final drop to it, though short, was almost vertical. Fred turned into the slope and climbed down about halfway, then held on to rock knobs and had Qi put her shoes right on his head and shoulders. Then she stepped down onto his thigh, which he had propped up by sticking his foot into a crevice. His brother had done this for him during their one try at climbing, coaxing him down the entire descent, as Fred had often frozen in place. His brother had been really worried.

  Qi never froze. When she was down at his level, and had moved her feet and hands onto rocks in a way she said made her secure, he climbed down again, kicking for footholds on knobs in looser rock, until he was standing in the culvert next to the road. She climbed down him again, and he provided her last foothold with his linked hands. Finally she hopped down beside him.

  They stood there and briefly exchanged a look, both flushed, soaked with sweat, streaked with blood. Quivering. Fred felt sick again, either with relief or because of a return of his nighttime nausea, he couldn’t tell. He tried to quell the feeling, not wanting a repetition of the vomiting. He put his hands on his knees and let his head hang. Slowly the nausea passed. It was a wretched feeling. After a while they clambered up onto the asphalt road.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  She gave him one of her looks. Possibly it had been a rhetorical question.

  To the west the road was slightly uphill. Presumably that way would lead them around the island’s west side, where they had seen residential towers during the previous night’s ferry ride from Lamma Island. To the east it was slightly downhill, which was attractive, but they didn’t have any idea what lay that way, or how far away it might be.

  They chose west without even discussing it, and started to walk. From time to time they came on benches set on the downhill side of the road overlooking the sea, and they sat on each of these and rested. When they passed creeks clattering down the hillside near waterfalls, Fred stuck his face in the water and drank, and suggested that Qi do the same.

  “What if it’s contaminated?” she asked anxiously.

  “Let’s worry about that later. You need to stay hydrated.” He drank again to show her. “Usually water in the hills is cleaner than you think.”

  She stared at him as if he were crazy. “Not in China!”

  “Well, but this is Hong Kong. And this little creek must be spring-fed, or recent rainwater. And you need to stay hydrated. So try just a little. We can eat some antibiotics later.”

  She drank. Fred felt hungry as well as weak, and assumed she must too. He was worried about her pregnancy. If it weren’t for that, they would be okay; but that had to be a worry for her, and so it was for him too. What could pregnant women withstand? He had no idea. Probably a lot. He recalled reading stories in his childhood of peasant women harvesting crops right up to their due dates, giving birth in the fields and going back to work the very next hour, and so on. Those could have been stupid stories, he had no idea. An example of this Orientalism Qi had mentioned, attributing to peasants the toughness of animals because they were not quite human. Well, humans were animals. He recalled the brief period he had tried swimming with an adult swim group, another experiment suggested by his brother, and watching a woman eight months pregnant fly by him for lap after lap, complaining during their rests that the kid was kicking her after her flip turns. People were animals, sure, and strong as such; or could be strong. As for this particular woman, he didn’t know. She was tough, he knew that. But strong? Well, she had held on to that slope and made her way down as capably as him. But now he was wasted, and she could be too.

  There was nothing to do but walk on.

  After an hour or so they came to a little knot of buildings lining the road, and fortunately, at least in some senses, these were tourist establishments, meaning outdoor restaurants and cheap gift shops, overlooking what was apparently the reservoir Qi had remembered hearing about; in any case, a big lake. There were very few people or cars around, but the shops were open, and Qi had some paper money in her pockets to give to the workers at a food stand window. They ate and drank like starving people. Fred worried about the sesame chicken and ate mostly rice, gagging a little as he did. The previous night’s ordeal was still vivid to him, a body memory, but also he was starving.

  They both noticed at the same time the other one scarfing down food, and they shared a glance, almost smiling; but they weren’t yet there. After that Qi made a long trip to the bathroom, and when she returned she looked more normal. Fred tried to clean up in a similar way in the men’s room. The food and soda felt okay in his stomach, not great but not sickening. He wondered how Qi had felt during that last long walk along the road. She hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t complained, hadn’t wondered aloud how much longer it would be, nothing. Not a word. He came back out to where she was sitting and leaned over and kissed the top of her head, surprising them both. She knew by now it wasn’t like him.

  “You’re tough,” he explained, looking up the road.

  She ducked her head, dodging the compliment. Such a round face, such a sultry face. She looked like a prima donna. Looks were so often deceptive, he wondered why anyone ever tried to take anything from them. She was glowing in the midday air. They were both still sweating.

  “This is no time to get a case of yellow fever,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know—white male tech nerd falls for mysterious Chinese female? Yellow fever, they call it. A total cliché.”

  Fred felt his face burning. He blinked hard, tried to think.

  She looked up at him and said, “Hey! Joke! I was joking!”

  “Oh.”

  She tugged on his arm and got him to sit down on the bench beside her. He stared at the asphalt of the road, which had little lines of grass growing through it this way and that. After a while he cooled down a little, but it was too humid for sweat to help much by way of evaporative cooling. Certainly his face was still hot.

  After a while they got up and walked west again. Fred felt a pinching on the back of his right heel, sign that a blister was on its way. The food he had eaten was lumping in his belly, and he was afraid he might get sick again.

  The road curved north and became a street, and farther on they came to a bus stop. They plopped onto the bus bench under its rain roof, wordlessly enjoying the shade. When a bus came, headed
north toward the city proper, they got on it and Qi paid again. The bus hummed into the westernmost end of Hong Kong, which was mostly residential, with skyscraper apartment buildings lining the road on both sides. It was amazing how many skyscrapers there were, even out here on the edge of the city.

  Fred said something to this effect, and after a while Qi replied. “Someone told me that all of Australia has six hundred buildings that are taller than thirty stories, and Hong Kong has eight thousand.”

  “I guess when there isn’t much land, you go up.”

  She didn’t reply.

  They watched the city flow by them. Stop after stop. People got off and others then got on.

  “Where are we going?” Fred asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe we can stay on the bus for a while. It’s like a motel on wheels.”

  “Except for no food or bathroom.”

  “I know. But we can get off and get food and go to the bathroom, then get back on another bus and sit down again.”

  “How long can we do that?”

  “Till I figure out what to do next!”

  “Okay okay. You’re right. I don’t have a better idea, and in the meantime it’s what we’ve got.”

  They sat there pressed side to side. They were spending a lot of time in physical contact, it seemed to Fred. He was getting familiar with her heft, her smell. The sheen of her black hair. The details of her body’s shape, such as the way the flare of her hips was about as wide as her shoulders. Her abilities as an athlete. Her character. She rested her head against his shoulder again; she seemed to feel no hesitation in doing that. She accepted him as a known quantity.

  At a stop somewhere near Central, with a view up one wide street to the ferry terminal where they had debarked from the boat the previous evening, three men got on the bus and came back and stood over them. They spoke in Chinese. Qi spoke back sharply, looking surprised.

  Fred stared at them, at her. Qi said something to them in a low choked voice, and they looked startled, then annoyed.

  Fred almost asked what was going on, then almost stood up, but she took his hand in hers and squeezed it, keeping him in place while she was saying something sharp to them.

  Finally she glanced at him. “Come on,” she said. “They’ve got us.”

  TA SHU 5

  da huozhe xiao

  Big or Small

  I walk the streets of my town and look at its people. My fellow citizens. Here a gang of young men in rainbow shirts, slouching by in their foxi Zen whateverism, white baseball caps worn at a tilt. I like them. Women’s black hair everywhere gleaming in the sun. I like black hair in all its variety. Also the white hair that follows black hair in old age. I am a white-haired old man, but I still like black hair. An old man, even older than me, sits at his corner brazier cooking pork strips for sale. I exchange greetings with him, I stop to look around. Street trees in the sunset, their fake silk blossoms incandescent in horizontal light. Green Beijing is always such a joy to see, and also to smell: the clean air, dinners cooking, and no traffic exhaust, strange but true. The old north-south orientation of the city, with the elite in the north and the poor to the south, has mostly gone away. The Maoists built great Chang’an Avenue to cut that north-south orientation in half, marking the new China with an east-west stroke of immense calligraphic power. Broad tree-lined boulevard, big public buildings monumentally flanking it, orientation directing the eye to the sinking sun like some Paleolithic astro-archeology. This powerful feng shui was the work of some great geomancer, possibly Zhou Enlai, I don’t recall.

  My hometown is crowded. When is Beijing not crowded? Even at three a.m. it’s crowded. I like the feel of all that action. Faces bright with life, people pursuing their project of the hour. Everyone is comfortable among their fellow Beijingers, we are like fish in water. Other people are just clear water to us, we swim through our fellows, we move together like a school of fish. What I can see of Beijing now is like a small town on market night—it’s just that there are a hundred thousand blocks just like it, running out from here across the land in all directions. So it is both crowded and uncrowded at one and the same time.

  That happens so often here. Put it this way: anything you can say about China that you think might be true, the opposite statement will also be true. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

  Say for instance that China is big. Fair enough; it is big. A billion and a half people, one of every six people on Earth, living on a big chunk of Asia, in a country with the longest continuous history of any country. Big!

  Then turn it around and say: China is small.

  And this too is true. I see it right here on this corner. Introverted, authoritarian, monocultural, patriarchal; a small-minded place, with one history, one language, one party, one morality. So small! Think for instance of the way the Ministry of Propaganda now speaks of the Five Poisons, meaning the Uigurs, the Tibetans, the Taiwanese, the democracy advocates, and the Falun Gong. Poisons? Really? This is so small. It reduces China to just Han people who support the Party unequivocally. That’s a small number, maybe smaller than the Ministry of Propaganda imagines. The Party exists on the people’s sufferance. Mao used to speak of the fifty-five ethnic groups of the Chinese people. And we have two major languages, not one; putonghua is common, but Cantonese is spoken by one hundred million people, including many of the Chinese who live outside China, making them a political force of a very important kind. Not to mention the fifty-five ethnic languages, and so on. So, not the Five Poisons, please; rather the Five Loves, as taught in all our elementary schools: love of China, love of the Chinese people, love of work for China, love of scientific knowledge, love of socialism. These are the Big Five, as opposed to the Small Five of the supposed poisons. I myself frequently feel all the Five Loves, as I suppose many of you do.

  So, looking around and thinking about this, face after face, street after street, building after building, to be fair I have to admit that it seems more accurate to say that China is big than to say that it’s small. I could walk the streets of this city for the next ten years and never walk the same block twice. But you take my point, I hope. We think in pairs and quadrants, and in threes and nines, and every concept has its opposite embedded in it as part of its definition. So we can say, in just that way: China is simple, China is complicated. China is rich, China is poor. China is proud, China is forever traumatized by its century of humiliation. On it goes, each truth balanced by its opposite, until all the combinations come to this, which actually I think has no valid opposite: China is confusing. To say China is easy to understand—no. I don’t know anyone who would say that. It would be a little crazy to say that.

  So, with that admitted, we become like the people in the indoor/outdoor workshop I am passing right now. Here men and women toil with admirable focus to carve mammoth tusks from Siberia into hollowed-out sculptures of the most amazingly meticulous and intricate figuration. We are like these dexterous workers, and our idea of China is like one of these mammoth tusks. We chip away at it, and sliver by sliver we carve an elaborate model of China, something we can see and touch and try to understand. The model can explain things to us, it can be beautiful. But remember it is never China.

  AI 5

  wolidou

  Infighting

  Comrade, I have another alert for you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A back channel into the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection headquarters overheard a message from a commission field team stationed in its Hong Kong office, reporting to Beijing. Two of their agents in Hong Kong observed another team of agents arresting Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks.”

  “Discipline inspection agents observed other agents?”

  “Yes. Those commission agents reporting this arrest to Beijing sounded displeased at this new development, saying they had located Chan and Fredericks getting on a bus in west Hong Kong, and were following the two to see if they would lead the agents to a safe house where they suspect someon
e must have been hiding the two young people since the time they disappeared from Shekou. Now, instead, the two are in the custody of this other group.”

  “Which group?”

  “The Hong Kong commission officers were perhaps using a code name for them, as they called these interlopers red darts.”

  “Red darts? Not Red Spear?”

  “Red darts. I can replay the recording of the report for you, if you like.”

  “Please do that.”

  The analyst listened to the recorded voices. The men making their report did indeed call the agents who had arrested Chan and Fredericks red darts. Hongse feibiao. It was not a term he had heard before. The agents were definitely not happy.

  He said, “Please list all national security groups known to interact with the PLA.”

  “Ministry of Public Security. Ministry of State Security. Central Commission for Military and Civilian Integration. Small Leading Group on the Internet and Informatization. State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission. Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group. International Department of the Central Committee. National Security Commission. National Security Leading Small Group. Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. National Defense Science Commission. Cyberspace Administration. AI Strategic Advisory Committee. The Ministry of Propaganda. Lunar Security Administration. Lunar Research Personnel Coordination Committee.”

  “All right, please stop.”

  “There are more.”

  “I know. The group I would really like to belong to, if I had my choice, is the Economic System and Ecological Civilization System Reform Specialized Group. But this is not my fate. How many groups in total are on this list of security organizations?”