Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The refrigerator, then the air conditioner. The air conditioner, then the refrigerator. The cheep of birds. An hour of rain. Men in rowboats, harvesting fish. A pilot wave, crossing the bay.

  Dozing in the heat, Fred dreamily pondered the pilot wave theory. Their kitchen experiment had been an imitation of a macroscopic analog of the real microscopic two-slit experiments with photons. In the real analog experiments, during which they had gotten tiny oil droplets to skid across the water like skipping stones, they had been able to reproduce all kinds of quantum effects at the macro-scale, suggesting that the same kinds of things were happening down there at the micro. Stochastic electrodynamics, which was one current extension of pilot wave theory, postulated and described an electromagnetic zero-point field, a kind of subquantum realm through which the pilot wave moved. Possibly wave and particle quantum effects were just well-coordinated emergent phenomena that in fact were primarily happening in this speculated subquantum realm. Could there be something smaller than quanta? Sure. Reality shrank beyond their senses and no doubt could go smaller still, until it was smaller than their ability to detect by any means whatsoever. Same in the other direction, with things big beyond the visible universe; for all they knew, their universe could extend forever, or be a neutrino in some larger universe. They could only see what they could see. Beyond that, the unknown. The unknowable.

  “I want to be an agnotologist,” he said to Qi. “I want to study what we don’t know.”

  “You would be good at that,” Qi said.

  The next day one of Qi’s friends tapped at the door and stepped in to give them a couple of plastic bags of food. Fred put it all away while Qi talked to the young woman in Chinese. He was relieved to see that dishwashing soap had been included, per his request to their previous visitor.

  This one left unusually soon after arriving, leaving Qi scowling.

  “Uh-oh, what?” Fred asked, straightening up.

  She glanced at him, looked away. “One of the people who has been bringing us supplies has gone missing.”

  Fred considered this. He saw why she was upset. “So what do we do?” he said after a while.

  “I don’t know.” After a while she said, “I guess I should stay away from the windows, but could you sit where you can look down, and see if you think anyone is hanging around down there watching us?”

  “I can try.” If spotted, he could be any Western tourist. On the other hand he was definitely Fred Fredericks, presumably being looked for by at least someone in the world, with his photo easily available, he presumed. “We have Venetian blinds. I can tilt the blinds so that I can see out and people can’t see in.”

  “Good idea.”

  After that he spent a fair amount of time looking out their window at the village’s sidewalk and restaurant row. No one appeared to be at all interested in their place. He began to sort out who the regulars were and what they were doing, and they all seemed to have restaurant or fishing business. Almost all; some people just passed through. Tourists, locals, it was hard to tell. It was a very sleepy village. Still, the new tension in the room was palpable. There was no way to be sure they weren’t being watched. Proving a negative was always hard.

  “Could this person who went missing just have left or something?” he asked one day.

  “His name is Wei,” Qi said sharply. Her look turned dark. “I don’t think so. I mean, maybe, but I can’t think what it would be. So I’m really worried about him.”

  And about us, Fred didn’t say.

  “I wish I could go back to his last visit and warn him,” she said. “Tell him to get away somewhere.”

  “Maybe someone else did that instead of us.”

  “Maybe.”

  Fred could see, even in his sidelong glances, that she was very worried about this Wei. A friend, perhaps. He wondered again if his family had gotten word that he was okay. “Too bad we can’t take advantage of quantum backdating,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a couple of experiments you can do that show quantum effects that are like going backward in time, or changing the past.”

  “Really?”

  “Sort of. If you make a certain kind of molecule that combines particular kinds of atoms, you can heat and chill them such that the colder atom in the molecule gives its heat to the hotter one, which breaks entropy and is like a little instance of time going backward. Also, if you do the half-silvered mirror experiment in a certain way, it’s like the two-slit experiment, in that you can tweak it to get either wave results or particle results, but in this version of it, if you tweak the device after the photon has gone through the mirror, it retroactively changes what happened at the mirror. So it’s like you’ve changed the past.”

  “Wow,” Qi said. Then, wistfully: “Can’t you make one of your quantum phones do that? I want to call Wei last week.”

  “These aren’t actions that can convey information,” Fred explained. “Also they only last milliseconds. They’re just more ways in which the quantum realm is strange. Down at that level, things appear to be a kind of mush. Somehow by the time they layer up to our realm the usual laws of physics hold.”

  “Alas,” she said. She sighed, looking grim. “I guess we’re stuck twixt and tween.”

  “Like Schrödinger’s cat,” Fred said, trying to distract her.

  “Meaning right now we’re both alive and dead? That feels about right.”

  “I think we’re alive,” Fred ventured.

  “No. Someone has to look at us first, right? Then we’ll find out. Right now we’re both at once.”

  “Maybe there’s a pilot wave that already knows,” Fred said. He didn’t know what he meant.

  Once Qi woke up out of an uneasy nap and said, “Wow, I can feel it. Come here and feel.”

  Fred got up and went to her. She pulled up her shirt and bared her big belly, took his hand and put it to one side of her belly button. This was as much as Fred had ever touched a woman who wasn’t a relative or a dance partner, and he was distracted by that, until he felt a distinct thrust outward from inside her, very startling.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “You felt it?”

  “Of course.” He felt it again. “What, is it kicking?”

  “I think so.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No. It feels weird, but not painful.” Then she winced. “Uncomfortable sometimes.”

  “Like it’s turning over in bed,” Fred suggested.

  She shook her head, but smiling a little. “Getting crowded in there.”

  She stood and let her shirt down, put her hands overhead, leaned to right and left, then forward and back. Some rotations. She put her back to a wall, causing a gecko to relocate in haste. Squats up and down against the wall. Pink-cheeked and sweating. The AC came on. She sat down, then got up again and went over to the kitchen corner. Poured rice and two cups of water in the rice cooker and turned it on. Banged around in their food cabinet and at the sink.

  Fred regarded her. Now, even when her back was turned to him, he could see she was pregnant. He thought about how fermions had to rotate 720 degrees before they returned to their original position. This was one of the first facts that had snagged his mind when learning about the subatomic realm. Fermions existed in a Hilbert four-space, in dimensions beyond what humans could see at the macro-scale. What would it be like to see something like a fermion’s spin? Would it pulsate in place, would it shimmer and gleam, would it overwhelm the senses to look at it? Maybe it would look like Qi did now.

  Then one day she spent a lot of time in the bathroom, sighing and groaning to the point that Fred got worried. It wasn’t typical. In the late afternoon, after she came out, he ventured to say,

  “Can I help?”

  “No.”

  She looked around the room for a while and then announced, “I can’t stand this. Let’s go down and have dinner on the water. I want some food that isn’t this same stuff. I’m sick of my own
cooking.”

  I never liked it, Fred didn’t say. “Are you sure that’s smart?”

  “I’m sure it’s not smart. And yet nevertheless in spite of that.”

  “All right, whatever you say.”

  She stared at him as if he had said something offensive. Maybe he had.

  “I’m tired of this,” she said.

  “I know.”

  It had been thirty-six days, he thought. He realized suddenly that he was probably finding these days more interesting than she was. Realizing that did not help his mood. So he liked to sit around doing nothing in particular, thinking things over—was that strange? Yes, it was. He sighed.

  She looked out the window. After a while she said, “I think we can do it. Have dinner right at the water’s edge, no one will see us.”

  “The waiters?”

  “I’ll wear a hat and glasses.”

  You can’t hide those cheekbones, he didn’t say. Nor the way you walk. Probably they should trade shoes. Probably she would think that was stupid.

  “Come on,” she said. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  They left the apartment and went down its stairs. Right next to their concrete cube stood a tall multicolored brick building. Gray bricks held an inset of brick-colored bricks, which framed a gray doorway in which gold-leaf tree trunks were set. Some kind of shrine, it appeared. Gold Chinese characters covered the doorframe and lintel.

  “What is this?” Fred asked.

  “Ta Hu,” Qi explained. “The goddess who protects those who go to sea.”

  “In what religion?”

  She shrugged. “Chinese religion.”

  “Daoist? Buddhist?”

  “Older than those, I think.”

  They followed the little harbor’s only sidewalk to the long tarp roof that covered all the restaurants. Qi chose one of them to enter, speaking briefly to a waiter. He nodded and led them to a small table at the railing overlooking the water. It was near sunset, light frilly clouds turning yellow and pink overhead. Another waiter approached and Qi ordered something. “I ordered us a variety,” she said. “You can try a little of everything.”

  “Sounds good,” Fred lied.

  The waiters brought out dishes and water and tea for each of them, then tureens of soup and plates of rice, and after that, dish after dish of other food. Some things Fred recognized, especially an entire fish, that was easy, of course; but a lot of the dishes were filled with foods he couldn’t identify. Clumps of greenery; squares and balls of maybe tofu, or gelatin, or pork belly, or what have you. Gamely Fred tried everything, concealing from Qi as best he could that this was very difficult for him. He hated new foods. And many of the tastes, as with the appearances, completely baffled him. He had eaten a few times in China before, but never like this; he had protected himself by eating mostly rice and chicken. Now clams arrived, followed by mussels, then more cooked lumps of who knew what.

  Around them the sunset turned to dusk, and the string of lights edging the tarp overhead grew brighter. Their restaurant was almost completely empty. On the other side of the sidewalk running along the back of the restaurants, tall banks of lit fish tanks glowed like an aquarium wall. Fred watched as the waiters or cooks stood on ladders to maneuver nets around in the tanks, scooping up fish with deft quick turns and then taking them back where presumably the kitchens were. Fresh fish indeed.

  Then their waiter brought out two plates that held crustaceans so big they overhung the plates on all sides. Bigger than lobsters, with more legs than lobsters, sporting spikier shells that were blond in color. They both laughed. The scissors provided to cut through these shells were as heavy-duty as tin snips. Fred had a little experience with eating lobsters, so he accepted with some interest the challenge of getting to the meat of this armored beast. He had to be careful not to poke or slice his fingers in the effort. For a while they were both silent as they snipped away, making loud cracks when they succeeded in bringing enough pressure to bear. The meat tasted like crab, or lobster, or something like those.

  “What is this thing?” Fred asked.

  “Shrimp.”

  “Really? This big?”

  “Around here that’s how big they get.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  “And yet here it is.”

  “I’m trying to imagine the first person who hauled one of these out of the ocean and said, Oh yeah, let’s eat this.”

  She laughed again. “My dad used to say, we Chinese eat everything with legs except the table.”

  Later, when they had shifted into the realm of unidentifiable desserts, they sat back in their chairs and watched twilight breathing on the bay and the hills.

  “What do you think will happen?” Fred asked.

  She frowned. “To us, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure yet. I don’t think it’s the right moment yet for the movement to act. And I can’t see a way to get a truly private word to my dad.”

  “You two don’t have some private line?”

  She shook her head. “Even if I did, his security team is always listening.”

  Fred thought it over as he picked through the desserts, hoping for something he liked enough to fill up on; despite his attempt to seem normal, he had eaten very little. His taste buds by now were terrifically confused, and he felt just slightly ill.

  He ventured to say, “Do you think the heavy surveillance comes from having a one-party state?”

  She stared at him. “Why would you say that?”

  “It’s not true?”

  “It is true. But all one-party states have problems. That’s why America is so messed up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean America is more of a one-party state than China. It’s entirely ruled by the market. Actually the market is the only party in the world now, or it wants to be. So every nation has to deal with that in its own way.”

  “They usually say we have a two-party system,” Fred mentioned.

  “Your parties are just factions. That’s why people in your country are so angry. They can see it’s just one party, and one-party states are always corrupt. Polyarchies are better because power gets distributed to various groups. They’re inefficient and messy, with lots of turf battles, but that’s the cost of distributing power. It’s better than concentrated power.”

  Fred tried to think this over. His brain was as confused as his tongue. “I’m not sure,” he confessed.

  “No one is. All I’m really saying is that these names for systems that we use, they disguise all kinds of similarities. China and America are both one-party states, and they’re both polyarchies. Those are the two kinds of rule that are always struggling for dominance.”

  “So are you hoping the two of them will kind of …?”

  “Influence each other? Combine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe. People talk about the G2 now, as if we’re the only ones that matter, at least in economic terms. And in some ways we mirror each other. So if you could take the best of each …”

  “Good idea.”

  She looked up at him as if to see if he was being sarcastic. But Fred was never sarcastic, as she should have known by now; and maybe she did. She looked down, poked around on her plate as if looking for something appealing.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “This has been nice. Thank you for this.”

  “Thank you for sticking with me,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could leave.”

  “No. I’m in just as much trouble as you are. If not more.”

  “I guess. But we could probably get you into an American consulate now.”

  Fred shrugged. He knew immediately he didn’t want that.

  She stared at him curiously.

  They sipped tea. Dusk turned the water of the bay a glossy black. She paid the waiter with one of the wristpads her friends
had given them in Beijing. They got up and walked back toward their little concrete refuge.

  At the end of the row of restaurants, she stopped and put her hand to his arm.

  “What?”

  She turned him around with a hard pull, began to walk the other way with her hand still pulling his arm.

  “What?”

  She lowered her head as they passed a couple, then said, “There are people waiting in our doorway. We have to get out of here. Stay quiet again.”

  “Damn,” Fred said, feeling a jolt of dismay. But I liked that place! he almost said. I wanted to stay there. I wanted time to stop there.

  Again they were leaving everything behind. By now that wasn’t much more than their toothbrushes from the train, but still. To only have the clothes on your back. “Where will we go?”

  “There’s a little ferry at the end of this dock that runs people back to the city after they eat at these restaurants. We’ll take that and hope they don’t have anyone on it.”

  She turned them down a boardwalk that led to the water between two of the central restaurants. At its end was moored a water taxi with a glass-enclosed lower deck, and an open upper deck with another dozen seats. Qi showed the boatman her restaurant receipt and led Fred to the upper deck, and sat him down between her and the stairs they had ascended.

  After a few minutes the boat cast off and burbled away, disturbing the glassy surface of the bay. They were the only ones sitting on the upper deck, and there were only eight or nine people below them on the glassed-in deck. It was slightly chilly up top, and the wind blew through their clothes. Qi huddled into his side and then stayed put.

  “What now?” Fred asked.

  After a long silence she said, “I’ve got an old friend from school who lives up on Victoria Peak. I’m thinking of trying her.”

  “From that Swiss school? The good one?”

  “Yes.”

  “So is this someone …”

  “Someone I can trust?”

  “Someone you can drop in on unannounced? With nothing?”