Red Moon

CHAPTER EIGHT tai diejia yuanli Superposition

Qi’s friends left Fred and Qi in the little apartment overlooking the harbor. They stood there alone in the silence, slumping under the weight of Earth.

Wandering around aimlessly, they found there was food in the refrigerator, groceries in the cabinets over the stove, pots and pans under the sink. It was all in a single room, with the kitchen in one corner. There was a bedroom for Qi, an old futon in the living room for Fred. The bathroom was next to the bedroom, with doors to both bedroom and living room. A big window faced the bay, a small one over the sink gave a view of greenery out back. A shelf of random tourist paperbacks. Fred looked at them but could not take them in. He collapsed in an old armchair, across a wooden coffee table from the couch. Qi was already on the couch falling asleep. Fred followed her down, too tired to be either worried or relieved.

When they woke they took turns in the bathroom, and Qi got some rice going in the kitchen’s rice cooker, then some vegetables in a wok hot with sesame oil. Fred discovered he was hungry, so hungry he found himself almost too queasy to eat when Qi dropped a plate on the table before him. He stared at it.

Qi tossed down her meal, displaying a thoughtless virtuosity in her chopstick technique. “What’s wrong?” she asked when her plate was empty.

“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Something,” she suggested.

“Well,” he said, looking at the battered old hardwood floor. Suddenly he discovered it: “I’m concerned that my parents and brother don’t know where I am. They’re sure to be worried. It’s been over a week, right? I don’t even know how long exactly. They’ll be freaking out. I want to get word to them that I’m okay.”

She shook her head. “We need to stay completely hidden for a while.”

Fred pressed his lips together. “I want them to know I’m okay.”

“But what if contacting them gets you arrested again? I mean, which is worse, them worried or you in jail?”

“I don’t see why getting word to them should give us away. Won’t your friends be coming back here?”

“Not for a while. We need to be totally hidden for a while.”

“Then maybe I should just go to the American embassy in Hong Kong,” Fred suggested. “Go there myself, catch a ferry and just find it.”

She was staring at him unhappily, he could see that in his peripheral vision. “If they catch you,” she said, “they’ll catch me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“What, do you miss them?”

He shook his head. “I just don’t want them to worry about me!” He felt a spasm attempting to shake him, and held himself rigidly to forestall it.

“So you don’t miss them?”

“I live in Basel!” he said. “Actually, I miss my cat in Basel. But I want to get word to my family that I’m okay.”

“You’re not okay!”

“I’m alive. I want them to know that. Don’t you want your parents to know you’re alive?”

“They assume that until they hear otherwise.”

She was still staring at him, he could tell. Stubbornly he stared at the floor. He could outwait anybody, that he knew.

After a long pause she said, “Okay. When my friends come again, we’ll ask them to get word to your people. It will have to come to them from out of nowhere. I don’t know how reassuring that will be.”

“Better than nothing.”

“Okay. But it can’t happen for a few days more. I need to disappear completely for a while. There were some informers in that group I spoke to in Shekou, there always are. So now my friends are setting a track of sightings of me that will make it look like I went to Guangzhou. Nothing can interfere with that or else it won’t work.”

Fred shrugged. “As long as it happens as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” she said again, impatiently.

Fred could see she was frowning as she thought about things. He kept his eyes on the floor. Finally he levered some rice off the plate and into his mouth. The vegetables he couldn’t face.

Three days later, one of Qi’s friends came by to share some news. Qi gave her Fred’s brother’s contact information, with instructions to send word that Fred was okay, but by roundabout means, four cell steps at a minimum. The woman nodded and took off. After that Fred felt his stomach relax a little. Now he could settle into this apartment a little easier.

After that, Qi’s friends dropped by every four or five days. In between those times, the two of them sat in the apartment. The wristpads her friends had given them in Beijing were powered off and locked in a Faraday box. Cut off from the cloud, they spent their time reading the paperbacks that had been left there, or looking out the window at what Qi’s friends told her was called Picnic Bay. They saw no picnics. Clouds floated low over the green hills surrounding the bay, and the little boats at anchor were sometimes visited by people in rowboats. Other people in rowboats or small motor dinghies were harvesting fish from the aquaculture farms in the bay. Other than that, nothing much seemed to happen. From time to time a bigger boat, like the one that had brought them to the island, arrived at a dock protruding from the middle of the row of corniche restaurants that ran the whole length of the village. After these arrivals the restaurants had some customers; later that ferry would leave, taking the customers with it. The rest of the time the restaurants seemed mostly empty.

Qi was quiet through these days. She spent a fair bit of time in the bathroom, and sometimes came out looking pale and damp. She was looking quite pregnant now, rounded in front in that characteristic way. A slight woman otherwise, so it really showed. Fred wondered if she was suffering from morning sickness, but he didn’t want to ask her about it. Despite the slightly bloody intimacy of their train ride, or maybe because of it, she seemed very private, and even though they were living in a two-room apartment with a single bathroom, she kept to herself both physically and mentally, and was never less than fully dressed, even though the days in the apartment were hot. Sometimes it rained for an hour, then the skies cleared and it grew hot again. Usually they kept the window open, and the sea smells from the bay were fishier than Fred remembered other oceansides smelling. Despite the picturesque corniche of restaurants, which more and more looked like a hope for tourism rather than the real thing, it was a working bay.

Most days Qi spent a fair amount of time going through the kitchen cabinets, lining up ingredients and chopping vegetables at speed, then cooking and eating. She got hungry more often than Fred. He wasn’t sure if she was a good cook or not, because to him everything she cooked was spicy. Anyway she was definitely into it. She talked to herself as she cooked, muttering complaints, it sounded like, especially after ransacking the spice cabinet. Three meals a day, four meals a day—probably it was a way for her to pass the time. And she was of course eating for two. Finally Fred saw what people meant by that phrase.

One day, two of Qi’s friends dropped by chattering with news of some legal battle against Beijing won by Hong Kong advocates. The three Chinese discussed this in a mix of Chinese and English, the English a concession to Fred’s presence, he could see; even so he couldn’t follow the details, and didn’t want to ask for explanations. Despite his reticence they tried to tell him about it. Hong Kong had been a British city, built on land seized from the Chinese Empire, until Britain ceded it back to China in 1997. But that handover had come with a fifty-year period of semiautonomy attached to it. So now the time to submit to full control from Beijing had come, the turnover had happened just a month before: July 1, 2047. The uproar over reunification was still ongoing, with another umbrella revolution testing the rules Beijing had announced. Things were going to change one way or another. During the fifty-year interval period, the Beijing government had agreed to let Hong Kong keep some representative government of its own. One country two systems, this had been called. That made the city something like the Special Administrative Regions that had been set up elsewhere in China, but with its own particular history. This was true all over. Macau the stupid casino, Tibet the weirdo Buddhists, the moon and its band of technolunatics, they were all varieties of SAR. Long ago the offer had been made to Taiwan to become a new SAR, and supposedly they were considering this offer, although who would be so stupid as to take it; but because they might, Beijing had treated Hong Kong better than it would have otherwise, because it wanted to show Taiwan how good it was to its SARs, with the hope that Taiwan would then volunteer to rejoin the mainland. This meant that Hong Kong and Taiwan had had a relationship closer than what might have existed otherwise, as each helped the other stay a little freer of Beijing’s heavy rule. Now that too would change.

North Korea was another kind of client state, they said, like some kind of really fucked-up SAR. Singapore, having been founded by Chinese expats, was some kind of cousin or nephew to China, with a distant resemblance to the SARs. Tibet was too big to be normal—so big, high, and weird that it was not an SAR but rather a province of the nation, in theory the same as any other province. So it didn’t get discussed in the same way Hong Kong and the other city-states did. That said, it was in fact a specially administered region. As was Inner Mongolia, and the western regions like Xinjiang, where ethnic minorities were still numerous despite the government having deliberately flooded these regions with Han, so the locals were no longer majorities even in their own home regions.

“The moon,” Qi remarked at one point, “is like a miniature Hong Kong in a giant Tibet.”

“The question is which one is it like politically,” one of their visitors said.

Qi shrugged. “It’s so different up there that it will be a new thing. That’s what I liked about it.”

“Why did you go there again?” Fred asked.

She shrugged. “I wanted to get away.” She looked around the room. “This kind of hiding—this is how I live all the time. It’s gone on for years. So I tried to get away from that. I guess it didn’t work.”

She fell into a brooding silence, and after a while her friends left.

One evening, when they were chopping up the makings of a salad, Fred said hesitantly, “So who are those people helping us? And what was that group you met in that cellar in Shekou? And what did you say to them?”

“They were migrants, there in Shekou,” she said, chopping faster than Fred could imagine chopping. It was alarming: chopchopchopchopchop! “Migrants, and migrant advocates.”

“They looked Chinese to me.”

She stared at him. “Internal migrants.”

“How do you mean?”

“Do you know about the hukou system?”

“No. Tell me.”

She sighed at his ignorance. “In China, where you are born determines your whole life. You’re assigned a household registration tied to your birthplace, and that’s the only place you can legally live, unless you get registered somewhere else by getting a registered job, or getting into a school. But those are hard things to get, and most people have to stay where they were born. So if you’re born out in the country, that’s it. And life there is so hard it’s almost like the Middle Ages. Subsistence farming, not much money, not much to do. People go hungry there, sometimes. So lots of people leave their legal residence and come to the cities to find work. Those are the migrants.”

“Are there a lot of them?”

She gave him one of her hard looks. “Five hundred million people, is that a lot?”

“Um, yes.”

“One-third of all Chinese. More than all the people in America.”

“Really?”

“Really. And the thing is, since these people aren’t in the cities legally, they can’t get health care or put their kids in school. And their employers can exploit them, pay them crap and not provide any worker safeguards. When they get sick they have to go home to where they are registered. Same when they lose their jobs. If they get robbed, they can’t go to police.”

“That sounds bad.”

“Yes! It’s part of what’s called the crisis of representation, and maybe the biggest part. Lots of people in this world have no real representation in government. Not just China, but everywhere. America too. So now, in China, all kinds of migrant networks have developed as work-arounds. Groups from the same region, or groups sharing information by word of mouth, so that they can find out where the informal pay is highest. They also try to protect each other, like with private security or militia. And there are foremen who hire them who are better than others. But even so, they’re vulnerable. They’re second-class citizens. Sometimes the Party has tried to reform the system, but it’s too big, and the urban Chinese who have a good hukou have advantages they don’t want to share. They’re like the middle class anywhere. With so many poor people in this world, can the middle class afford to share? If they do, won’t they become just as poor as the poor? So a lot of privileged Chinese, and a lot of Party members, are not in any hurry to reform. Why get rid of such a big pool of cheap labor? And so five hundred million people live like illegal immigrants in their own country. It’s like the caste system in India! They’re not untouchables, but no one touches them. And all because they were born in the back country. Waidiren means people from outside the city. Nongmingong means peasant workers, but now it’s another word for these people. So is diduan renkou, the low-end population.”

“So what did you say to them?” Fred asked, remembering their faces.

“I told them they’re a force! They’re the workers, the people. Renmin! The Chinese revolutions were all won by the masses. So these words in Chinese are very powerful politically. Renmin, that’s the people. Qunzhong, that’s the masses. Dazhong, that’s like the common people. Now people are using these words again, and sharing sayings from the 1911 revolution, and the war against Japan, and the Communist revolution. Lots of people are quoting Mao again, and not just baizuo, white leftists that means, meaning people like you from the West telling us what to do.”

“I never did that.”

She laughed. “I should hope not, you know so little! But that doesn’t always stop people.”

“So they’re organizing?”

“Yes. But offline. It’s not a netizen thing. The netizens are mostly urban youth, content to live in their wrists and get by in the gig economy. They’re not working-class, they’re the hollowed-out middle class. Often very nationalistic. They’ve taken the Party line, and they don’t see how much they have in common with the migrants. They’re the precariat, do you know that word? No? Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat. For us here, it’s the withouts. The two withouts, the three withouts, there are all kinds of variations on the withouts, but the main without is a hukou registration where you actually work. Those are the people you saw in that room.”

“And are you their leader?”

“I’m one of them,” she said after thinking this over for a while. “It didn’t make sense at first, because I’m a princeling and a woman, and I’ve lived abroad, and my dad is in the Party leadership. But all that might be part of it. I work well as a figurehead. But I want to be more than a figurehead, so I help organize things. Chinese revolutionary movements have often had woman leaders. There was the one in the White Lotus revolt, and the one who fucked things up at Tiananmen Square. And Jiang Qing for that matter, Mao’s wife. Or Empress Dowager Longyu, who ran things at the end of the Qing dynasty. And there’s been various other empresses who seized power when their husbands died.”

“How did a woman fuck things up at Tiananmen Square?”

“She wanted bloodshed more than reform. And she got it.” She chopped up a carrot as if she were beheading this person. It was truly impressive how fast she could chop vegetables. “Anyway it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Now is now. Now, Chinese women are fed up. We’ve always been second-class citizens. As Confucius recommends! That’s one reason I like the Maoists, they at least pretended to be feminists. Women hold up half the sky! But for most of Chinese history women have been internal migrants. They migrate from father’s family to husband’s family, and work like donkeys while keeping the whole thing going. Social reproduction they call it but really it’s everything. And for a long time with their feet squished to little balls so they couldn’t even walk. Now they’re workers too along with everything else, twelve hours a day in a factory sewing or running robots, then go home and do all the rest of it, and it’s just too much.” Chopchopchopchopchop! “We’re all mad. A lot of them are madder than I am! Because they’re the ones in the sweatshops. Sweet little Chinese girls all into their cloud games and pop stars, I tell you, they will jump out of their phones and kill you dead if they get a chance.”

“So… you’re doing a kind of united front?” Fred ventured.

“Exactly!” She stared at him, surprised. “Where did you get that? Are you pretending to be stupider than you really are?”

“No,” Fred said promptly.

She laughed at this promptness.

“So,” he said, pleased to have made her laugh in the midst of her chopping the world to bits, “all this happens offline?”

“Yes. It has to. But there are spies everywhere, of course. So the security agencies know what’s going on, and they’re trying to stop it. But the migrants use guanxi networks and word of mouth. It’s like a big family, and if you don’t trust someone with your life, you don’t talk to them about this stuff. The old cell structures have come back too, so if a cell gets penetrated it can’t bring down more than that one. And it helps a lot that the security agencies overlap, and they fight each other.”

“Why are there overlapping systems?”

She shrugged. “That’s China. The street council decides things, then the district, the town, the province, then the various economic agencies, all the way up to the top. So surveillance isn’t any more coordinated than resistance. And we’ve got the numbers. There’s about a hundred million Party members, and about five hundred million internal migrants. That’s too many to control. Half a billion people—they can’t put them all in prison!”

“But they could put the leaders in prison,” Fred pointed out. “Then hope that that messes things up enough to keep a lid on dissent.”

She nodded, looking grim. “Right. So here we are.” She shrugged. She was back in hiding again, her look said. No choice. Trapped. Everything on the cutting board was chopped. It was going to be the finest-chopped salad Fred had ever eaten. Lucky they were using chopsticks rather than forks. “Let’s eat.”

Another time they were sitting in their little living room after eating a meal, sweating in the heat, both half-asleep. When they roused from this torpor, there was nothing to do. They had been in the apartment for nineteen days, by Fred’s count. Qi was bigger than ever. Her belly was growing day by day. She had cooked three meals already, and there was still time to kill.

“Tell me a story,” she demanded of him.

“I don’t know any stories,” he said, alarmed.

“Everybody knows some stories.”

“Not me.” Then he added, “What about those Swiss boarding schools? Why did you keep running away from them? I thought they were supposed to be nice.”

“No.”

“So you ran away, how many times did you say?”

“I don’t know. I can hardly remember.”

“Hard to believe.”

She laughed at this. “I guess that’s right. I remember.”

She sat there thinking for a while. There was no hurry. Finally she said, “When I was first sent to Switzerland, I was really mad. Hurt. It was my father’s doing, of course, although my mother went along with it, I’m sure. But he wanted me out of China, mostly to get an international education. Learn English, all that. He was probably right,” she added, nodding to herself. “So he sent me, and I was young enough that I decided it was because he didn’t love me.”

“How old were you?”

“About eleven or twelve, I guess. It was 2026 I think? So wait, I was nine. Wow, I had it wrong. That’s interesting. Anyway, I loved my father, and I thought he loved me, so he explained and explained why he was doing it, but I still felt betrayed. I was very mad at him. And at my mom too, for not defending me. But, you know. They bundled me off. And as it turned out, they sent me to a boarding school they had never been to, called Nouvelle École de l’Humanité, in the lower Alps, above Bern. I don’t know how or why they chose that one, because my mom wouldn’t have approved if she had known what it was like. But I think a friend of theirs raved about it, said it had been great for their daughter, another Party princess. So they sent me there sight unseen.”

“And it was bad?”

“I thought so at first. It was some kind of weirdo alternative education, based on Pestalozzi, or Steiner, or Piaget, I mean really who knows. The Swiss can be very theoretical. The couple who founded it were hippies of some kind, pretty crazy from the sound of it.”

“Baizuo?”

She laughed. “No, they just loved nature. The Alps in particular. So, we always got up before dawn and took cold showers to start the day, and then we cleaned out the stables, and then we farmed, and we killed and chopped up chickens, and climbed some Alps, and cooked and cleaned, and did lots of exercises, and like that.”

“And you hated it?” Fred guessed.

“Of course I did! At least at first. But then, just as I was getting used to it, my parents finally paid attention to the letters I was sending home. I had to write them on paper and send them by mail, it was like throwing them into the Aare in a bottle. None of us ever heard back from anyone. We had been forgotten. We were stuck in a hippie gulag. But finally my parents came for a visit, and they were horrified. Politely and without saying a word, I mean they were perfectly inscrutable Orientals to the people in charge there, but I could see it no problem. Oh my God, their princess getting her hands dirty! Their precious daughter shoveling horseshit! All of their Chinese elite instincts were appalled. The whole point of joining the Party is to get off the farm! So they got me out of there as fast as they could and put me in another boarding school near Geneva, in Lausanne. Beautiful place, looking across the lake at Mont Blanc, all that. But the girls there, this was a girls-only school, they were from all over, with money leaking out of every pore. And there weren’t any boys around to distract them and make them be nice. Very soon I hated those girls with all my heart. They were the ones who made me into a Maoist.”

“Radicalized by rich girls in a Swiss boarding school?”

“Definitely. I hated them so much. Racist assholes, that’s what they were. There’s an age where you shouldn’t put a bunch of girls by themselves. The mean girls’ club is a real thing. They’re worse than any boys I ever saw.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club. I think you probably need boys and girls together at that age more than any other. Anyway I hated them.”

“What did they do?”

“Oh, just the usual shit. I don’t want to tell you. It’s always the same kind of stuff. Just saying it repeats it, somehow.”

“Okay.”

“Like one time I came in on them and they were wearing some of my clothes and pulling their eyes to the side and singing ‘We are Siamese, if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please.’”

“Siamese?”

“Whatever! It was a cartoon song. I looked it up. About Siamese cats, it turns out. Pretty funny in fact. But to them I was a gook, a slant, a chink!”

Just saying it repeats it, Fred knew not to say; although it was painful to hear that grating sound in her voice. He said, “I’m surprised the school’s administrators let that kind of thing happen.”

“They never know what really goes on in the dorms.”

“I guess not. And so…”

“So that’s when I started making my escapes. You don’t just run away from those places, you’re locked in. You have to escape. So that took some work, because that place was a real prison. Part of the deal is if you pay a ton of money to put your daughter in a place like that, they stay there.”

“They’re safe.”

“Safe! Safe to live with horrible racist bitches! That’s right. So, I got away three times, got caught three times. The Swiss have way better surveillance than China, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had no friends or money. Once I just walked into the forest and got lost out there. But the Swiss even have their forests surveilled. So the third time they caught me, I begged my father to send me back to my first school. The École was looking like utopia at that point. And he let me do it. After that I was fine.”

“So he was…”

“My dad was okay. He is okay. He tries. In fact I think of myself as complementing his efforts from below. As a family we are a pincer attack, you might say. Not that he would agree with that. But I’ll convince him of it by the time it’s all over. I’ll make him see it. If he doesn’t die first of a heart attack at how bad I am.”

Another time she put her head back onto her chair back and sighed heavily. “But what about you?” she said again. “And don’t answer with a question.”

Fred shrugged.

“What brought you to the moon?”

“Just my job.”

“I know that. You are a quantum mechanic.” She laughed briefly. “But what brought you to your job?”

“Oh I don’t know.”

“You must like quantum mechanics?”

Fred tilted his head and thought about it. “Yes. I do.”

“So go on. Go backward from that. What brought you to quantum mechanics?”

“Oh I don’t know.”

Fred was not comfortable. He didn’t know what he could say about his past. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain it to someone else?

She waited him out, watched him think it over. Not a warm look, but not a sharp look. Not irritated or annoyed or suddenly furious. Just watching. Curious. They had a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be able to outwait her. This was unusual; almost everyone else he had ever met in his life would get uncomfortable with his silences and then fill them, and he would be off the hook. Not this time.

“I didn’t fit in,” Fred finally said, surprising himself. “I never could quite get why people did what they did. I didn’t understand them. Or, I just couldn’t think fast enough. So everything was kind of mysterious. And, and, and… disturbing. So then, in my math classes, I could understand things. Things were clear. Like algebra. I liked algebra. Everything balanced out. And I could see things in geometry. Trig was geometry as processed by algebra, so I liked that too. Calculus was easy.”

She laughed. “That’s not a sentence you hear very often.”

“No, it’s easy. And then there was a little introductory unit on quantum mechanics, kind of to dispense with it and move on. And what the professor said about it was so weird and, and—and unlikely, that I got into it. It was interesting.”

“So that’s your biography? A list of your math classes?”

“I guess so.”

“What else did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what else did you do! In your life! Sports? Music? Theater? Dance? Travel? Friends? Romances?”

“No,” Fred said. That sounded a little extreme, all by itself, and so he added: “I mean, I had some friends.”

“Okay, good. That’s a start. Are you still in touch with them?”

“No.”

“Wow.” She stared at him. “You were a real geek.”

Fred sighed. “That’s one name people use.”

“What, there are others?”

Fred glanced at her, looked back at the floor. “You know there are.”

“What, like what?”

“Just saying it repeats it,” he said, swallowing hard.

“Really? That bad?”

He shrugged. “To think you’re a person, and then be told you’re a symptom? A diagnosis?”

She considered him. “Welcome to the world,” she suggested.

“Well I don’t like it,” he muttered. Then he added, more bitterly: “As if anyone knows. As if they know anything about it.”

She stared at him for a while. “I think I know what you mean. So, you suffered the slings and arrows of youthful geekdom.”

Fred nodded. Trying to remember: but in fact he was better at not remembering. “I guess so. But quantum mechanics gave me a way to—to do something. I could do the equations, I mean it’s a math, just like any other math, not that hard compared to some maths, but the results—or what the equations suggest about reality, because they work—it’s so counterintuitive. So bizarre compared to what we see in our sensory world, that, I don’t know. I found it interesting. And not everyone gets it. It’s not that hard as a math, but it is hard as a thing to understand. Like impossible. So I pursued it, and now, there’s more and more technology that is quantum mechanical. Including secure communications tech, which a lot of people want. So it’s a… it’s a way.”

“A way? To make a living?”

“A way.”

“A way?”

“Just a way. A way to be.”

“Like Daoism.”

“I don’t know. People do like to try to link quantum mechanics to something more tangible. Tangible or mystical.”

“You don’t?”

“I suppose I do. The thing about quantum mechanics is that when you try to make it make sense by analogy to something at our level of perception, it’s always a misrepresentation, so the real thing slips out of your grasp. You’re getting it wrong. So for a long time I preferred to keep it at the level of the math, and not try to explain it at all.”

“For a long time? And then something happened?”

“Well, yes.” Fred sat up on the couch, stirred by the thought. “People are using the math to design and build machines. More and more qubits are being stabilized in various ways. So something real is happening, something physical. So I started thinking about what the quantum realm was really doing, I mean in the physical world. I mean clearly it’s doing something. And the idea that it’s an entirely statistical probability state, that takes consciousness or measurement to make it collapse to an event—or that there are new universes branching out of every moment—none of that was working for me. There are several different interpretations of what the math is describing, because it’s so weird, but most of them just struck me as crazy.”

After he was silent for what might have been some time, thinking about this, she said sharply, “And then?”

Fred thought about it some more. “Then,” he said, “I started thinking more about the pilot wave interpretation. Have you heard of that one?”

She shook her head. “Tell me.”

“Well, people talk about the Copenhagen interpretation, which came mostly from Niels Bohr. His idea was that physical reality was a matter of probabilities, like the equations are, and that things at the subatomic level are undetermined until measured, at which point they become one thing or the other. Waves become particles, and particles add up to waves, but not in ways that make sense according to our senses, so in the end it’s too strange to understand.”

“That’s not much of an interpretation?”

“No. Einstein didn’t like it, Penrose didn’t like it. But the math definitely works, right down to the parts-per-trillion range. So it’s been hard to say how Bohr’s take on it is wrong. But right from the beginning, a physicist named de Broglie said there was another way of understanding it, which was that quantum particles were disturbing fields they were moving in, mostly by creating waves that moved ahead of the particles, like a pilot wave that you see in front of a boat. I’ve seen those from this window, looking at the boats on this bay. So, David Bohm talked about that as being disturbances in quantum fields. Then later they did some analog experiments that were like sending a droplet of oil skipping over a sheet of water, to show the kinds of effects that de Broglie suggested were happening at the quantum level.”

“Wait, what? Oil on water?”

“Yeah, you know how oil and water don’t mix, so when you shoot a droplet of oil across water, there’s a wave—”

“Show me,” she said.

“Well, I think it’s at a pretty small scale—”

“Show me!”

She was standing over him, hand out; when he took it, she pulled him to his feet. And then they had something to do.

They found the biggest pan in the apartment’s kitchen cabinets, a metal sheet pan about two feet long and a foot wide. “I don’t know if this will be big enough,” Fred said.

“It’s what we’ve got. Just make it work.”

“Okay, I’ll try.”

One of the few things Fred had done in his youth was to serve as teaching assistant to his high school physics teacher. The teacher had been a nice guy, and had probably given Fred the job to try to get him out of his shell a little. So Fred had worked on wave-tank experiments for a semester of his senior year, and now, remembering those, he found that ceramic chopsticks could be used to create dams across water filling the pan very shallowly; he could place three of them to make the two slits of the two-slit experiment. When they got that arranged, they put this apparatus on the coffee table and started making waves and observing them. It was a little messy, but waves on water can be counted on to spread and rebound in their usual way, and they had time to adjust the amount of water and the intensity of the initiating splashes until these effects were pretty clear, even the secondary waves that got through the two slits and interacted with each other on the other side of the dam. Interference patterns appeared, just as predicted, and interesting as such.

The oil droplets were not so easy. There was some sesame oil in the kitchen cabinet above the sink, but no obvious way to send a droplet of it skittering across the surface of their water to make the pilot wave. They tried a lot of methods, and ended up laughing a lot. Throwing; flicking; spitting; squeezing out of a basting bulb; shooting out of a red plastic water pistol found in a drawer—they kept trying things, they didn’t want it to end. The room smelled of sesame oil. Sometimes the drop would ooze across the top of the water with enough momentum to send a little wave across the water ahead of it. Once that wave hit the two slits hard enough that the little waves on the other sides of the slits were high enough to be seen interfering with each other, and Fred said,

“Yes! That’s the two-slit experiment. Now see, if the oil droplet were then to follow that wave on a certain trajectory, it would only go through one slit, but its wave already went through both. And on the other side, it would get pushed around by the interference pattern of that wave, and where it went then would be stochastic, meaning probabilistic, but its location would always fit the equations, just like they really do in quantum behaviors. And you don’t need an observer making an observation to make that happen. It will happen without an observer. It’s not just a probability state.”

“So—pilot wave!” Qi said, looking pleased. “So you’re an advocate of that interpretation, and it helps you in your work?”

Fred sat back on the couch, shook his head. “No. I don’t know if it helps or not. The math is the same either way. The quantum fields can’t be entered into the equations, and David Bohm was always suggesting they were contiguous to the entire universe. And judging by analogy to gravitational waves, the pilot waves are likely to be really small.”

“Like how small?”

“Like, if two black holes hundreds of times more massive than the sun collide, they make a gravitational wave that by the time it gets to us squeezes the Earth about the width of one proton. So how big of a wave can a photon make in a quantum field the size of the universe?”

“Wow,” Qi said after pondering this for a while. “Pretty small, I’m guessing.”

“Right. So I end up working on things that derive from the usual math. What the math is describing in physical terms doesn’t help me that much.” He waved at their wave tank. “Actually I’m not sure seeing it this way has ever helped me. I mostly try to leave that part blank.”

She sat in the armchair looking at him, he could tell; he continued to look at their wave tank. She was amused, he guessed, but maybe exasperated too.

“And you’re very good at leaving things blank,” she said.

“Yes?” He was pretty sure she would think this was a bad thing. “I feel kind of blank, pretty often. Or,” he confessed, “maybe baffled, you might say.”

She was nodding. “I bet you find me baffling!”

“Yes!”

She laughed at him. “Do you know about Yiman Wang’s yellow yellowface?”

“No.”

“How about Edward Said’s Orientalism?”

“No.”

“Of course not. Well, you should read them. They talk about how Westerners, when they look at Asians, they see a stranger, a big other. Some kind of blank that isn’t at all like them, and then they fill that blank in with a story they make up. Exotic inscrutable dragon lady! That’s me all right!” She laughed again.

Fred nodded, stifling a smile despite her laughter. He kept his eyes on the wave tank. He was pretty sure she didn’t really think it was funny.

“Everyone has to guess about everyone else,” he ventured at last. That was definitely true for him.

She bunched her lips into a little knot. “Maybe so,” she conceded. She thought about that and then dripped a drop of oil into their water tank. “The chink and the geek! Riding the pilot wave! Finding the dao together! Solving crimes and saving the world! Binge view the whole series!”

“I don’t like shows like that,” Fred said primly.

She laughed at him yet again, a real laugh.

They sat in the room sweating. He in the armchair, she stretched out on the couch. Breathing and sweating. The refrigerator grumbled a little less than half the time, in a tone about an octave lower than the whooshing hum of the window-box air conditioner, which was on a little more than half the time. The two were out of synch with each other. Fred was irritated by these noises more often than he would have liked. When either kicked on, he noticed both for a while. When the AC was on, it was a little too cold; when it went off, it quickly became too hot.

Qi shifted around the couch from one splayed posture to the next, groaning as she tried to get comfortable. She napped with her mouth open, looking like a little girl. She cooked spicy food. She marveled he could live on only rice, told him he would get sick, or terminally bored. That his capacity to withstand boredom was itself boring. She poked around in the various paperbacks on their shelf, trying one after another before tossing them aside. She stared at the ceiling. They were visited by a clan of small geckos that could hang upside down, and did. Fred wondered if word had gotten to his folks that he was alive. He wondered if his employers were trying to find him and help him. He wondered if Shor’s algorithm, which took advantage of quantum superposition to factor large numbers, could be used to define the temporal length of a moment of being. It had to be longer—it felt much longer—than the minimum temporal interval, the Planck interval, which was the time it took a photon moving at the speed of light to move across the Pauli exclusion zone within which two particles could not coexist: that minimal interval of time was 10^-44 of a second. A moment of being was more like a second, he felt, maybe three seconds. Meaning each moment of being was, when compared to the minimal interval of time, a near eternity. Much longer in proportion to the minimal interval than the lifetime of the universe was relative to a second. Although it could be argued that the universe’s lifetime had so far been fairly brief. He wondered what the largest prime number he could recite aloud might be.

Qi went to the bathroom about once an hour. When she came out she was always a little flushed and restless.

“What are you reading?” she would demand of Fred, if he was reading.

“This one is called Six Scenes from a Floating Life, by a Shen Fu.”

She groaned. “A classic.”

“It seems interesting.”

“What does it say to you right now? What sentence were you reading?”

“‘The Sage taught us, Do not use nets with too fine a mesh.’”

“Please, no Confucius! Something else.”

Fred flipped the page. “‘Now the clouds are flying past me; who will play the jade flutes over May plums by city and stream?’”

She sighed. “We need a different book.” She picked up a tattered oversized paperback called Eight Dime Novels. “I hope this book cost eighty cents.” She read from a page:

“‘It was the tightest fix in which he had ever been caught, and his mind, fertile as it was in expedients at such crises, could see no way of meeting the danger.’ Oh dear how will they escape!”

“Read on,” Fred suggested.

“‘When all the wood was thrown in that the stove could contain, and portions of the iron sheeting could be seen becoming red-hot, he ceased to heap in wood. They were ready to run at any moment; the gold was always secured about their persons. “When it blows up, run!” was the admonition of the boy.’ Wait—first it blows up and then they run? How are they going to avoid getting killed when it blows up?”

“Read on,” Fred said again.

And after that they spent part of every day reading aloud to each other. They read all eight of the dime novels, each taking up about twenty pages of the skinny oversized Dover paperback. Lots of laughs there, although the frequent blatant racism also made Qi shout “See? See?” But she shouted just as much, and also laughed a lot, at a Chinese book of quotations from Chairman Mao, which she translated extempore for Fred’s benefit. For a day or two they alternated passages, her from Mao, him from the Dover, and then from a fat little bird guide, which he picked up after seeing a brilliant red bird out the kitchen window.

“‘People of the world, be courageous, dare to fight, defy all difficulties, and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.’”

“That’s his pilot wave interpretation,” Fred observed.

“Aha! So the pilot wave theory is Leninist?”

“I don’t know, what does that mean?”

“You don’t know—come on. Leninism is what I was doing in that basement in Shekou.”

“I see,” Fred said, though he didn’t. He read from the bird guide: “‘Rufous-sided towhee. Note the rufous sides,’ thank you for that! ‘Smaller and more slender than robin; rummages noisily among dead leaves. Voice: note, chwee or shrenk. Song, a buzzy chweeee; sometimes chup chup chup zeeeeee.’” He enjoyed making the sounds.

Qi then read, “‘All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again, and so on till victory; this is the logic of the people.’”

“From a long-term point of view,” Fred repeated. “But how long?”

“Don’t make fun,” Qi commanded. “I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?”

“I do,” Fred said. “But what’s correct?”

“Maybe you can learn that here, it’s the very next quote. ‘Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle to make things, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.’”

“Interesting,” Fred said.

Qi nodded and read on: “‘The history of humanity is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’ That’s Marx, as I hope you know, but of course you don’t.”

“Groucho or Harpo?”

“Ha ha. Listen to Mao here, this is important: ‘This process is never ending. In any society in which classes exist, class struggle will never end. In a classless society, the struggle between new and old and between truth and falsehood will never end. In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, humanity makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore people have to go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, and complacency are all wrong. They are wrong because they agree neither with the historical facts of social development, nor with the facts of nature so far known to us, as revealed in the history of celestial bodies, the earth, life, and other natural phenomena,’ no doubt he is referring to your quantum world there.”

“No doubt,” Fred said. “That’s actually a pretty good summary of the situation.”

“Yes it is.”

“‘Skylark,’” he interjected. “‘Slightly larger than a sparrow, brown, strongly streaked; underparts buff white. Voice; note, a clear, liquid chirr-up. Song, in hovering flight, a high-pitched, tireless torrent of runs and trills, very long sustained.’”

She nodded, distracted by Mao, who had clearly caught her attention. “‘Youth, the world is yours as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, so full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.’”

“So full of vigor and vitality,” Fred said, and Qi smiled; they were both sprawled listlessly over the furniture. “I like that ‘eight or nine in the morning.’ He has a specific angle in mind.”

“A specific moment.”

“An angle.”

“But morning light. At sunset it’s not the same.”

“True. Anyway, Mao is more interesting than I would have thought.”

“I know, me too.”

“I thought you knew all about him.”

“Everybody gets told the story at school, but no one reads him. Maybe his poetry. Mostly he’s just a face, or an idea. And I’m only reading you the good stuff. The amount of crap is unbelievable.”

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?”

“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 with 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.

“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.”