Red Moon

CHAPTER TWENTY chaodai jicheng Dynastic Succession

Fred and Qi made their way up to a little compartment at the top of the front part of the rover, which was a big thing, a freighter it looked like. The garage door opened and off they went.

Qi sat down heavily in a seat and looked out the forward window. The compartment was like the bridge of a ship, set higher than the rest of the rover, with broad windows on all four sides. The road south was obvious ahead of them, a typical desert road, made of a mash of tread marks snaking to the horizon. The rover’s automatic pilot would keep them on this road, presumably, and in the meantime the dash had a radio on which Fred found some channels broadcasting from Earth. Also there was a screen with links to some lunar satellites; he shut it down in the hope that it wouldn’t reveal their location by way of those links. Of course there would be a transponder aboard. But he had to do what he could.

He rooted around in drawers on the bridge, began to read about their destination in a paper manual he found in one. Oceanus Procellarum was a vast basalt plain, home to a higher-than-usual concentration of potassium and rare earths, so that it was called the KREEP zone. The right eye of the man in the moon. Many mines were located there, including the one they were headed for. Most of them were located between the Aristarchus Plateau and the Marius Hills.

All very interesting, or it would have been if he weren’t so distracted. He would have liked to learn more about the infrastructures in Procellarum—the mines, the support buildings, the transport systems—but he couldn’t, because he didn’t want to make contact with the lunar cloud. The paper manual seemed to have been written in the early years of the mining effort.

“You’re not in the cloud are you?” he said to Qi.

She shook her head. “Just listening to the radio. I wish I could check things out. I have questions, but I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Good. I don’t think we should put out any signals.”

She gave him a look. “I may have to.” She gestured at the device Valerie had given them as they departed. “I think I should maybe contact whoever’s at the other end of this.”

“Are you sure?” Fred said. “Everything that’s happening now will happen without you. And obviously there are people after you.”

“They’ll be after me whether I send more messages or not.”

“Yeah, but sending messages might help them find you.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s not worth the risk.”

She shrugged, as if to say Fred knew too little to have an opinion on this. Even though it was his risk too.

They went back into their separate realms, Fred reading the onboard material and Qi listening to the radio. When they reconvened over some frozen meals that they heated in a microwave, they shared what they had learned.

“Nothing,” Fred reported briefly.

“Things are getting weird down there,” Qi said.

“Getting weird?”

“Weirder. Someone called out the National Guard in Washington, DC, and now the crowds there are four or five times bigger. Your Congress finished nationalizing the banks, which means they’re now directly in charge of the crisis. And a couple of new cryptocurrencies have appeared to join that virtual dollar, including a virtual renminbi too. No one knows who started them, but they’re supposed to be exchangeable one-for-one with the real currencies.”

“What will that do?”

“No one knows. Some say they’re like free money, others that they’re the end of money. Some say they’re just scams.”

Fred thought about this, then shook his head, baffled. “It seems like things are falling apart.”

She gave him her you are stupid look. “Yes.”

They were silent for a while. Then Fred said hesitantly, “Which is better, the world controlled by China and the US, or by global finance?”

Qi thought about this for a while. “It’s not as clear as that, but I guess I’d say the former. Just to get some control of the economy.”

“So that’s what you’re trying in China? Putting people in charge who will resist the market?”

“Yes. Like I told you before.” Her quick glance lashed Fred like a whip, then she was looking at her pad again. “We have a problem in China, because a lot of Party members work only for the Party. Even these big mass actions might not change that.” Then she laughed. “Although who knows, maybe they will! Did you see what just showed up? There’s an anonymous statement now in the cloud, looks like it was processed and distributed through an AI system. It’s a statement of what the demonstrators want. A lot of big changes are in it.”

“Like what?”

“Return of the iron rice bowl, reform of the hukou system, end of the Great Firewall, rule of law.”

Fred said, “Those aren’t that different from what Americans want, are they?”

“Maybe not. Maybe it’s a global people’s revolt.”

“Or a G2 people’s revolt,” he pointed out.

“Right. But that’s enough to swing everything.”

“And you’re the leader of the Chinese side of it.”

“I’m not the leader. I’ve been involved, but there is no leader.”

“I’ve heard people say you’re the leader. The cloud thinks you’re the leader. Your cousin and Ah Q were saying that you’re the Maitreya, that you’re the next Dalai Lama.”

“I hate all that bourgeois shit.”

“The Dalai Lama would be feudal shit, right?”

“The Dalai Lama is Paleolithic shit. He was the last shaman. I wish we still had him with us, but we don’t. Those times are gone.”

“But people are saying. The cloud is saying.”

“The cloud is stupid. People always want to make it personal, even when it’s everybody. I’m just trying to do my part.”

“But people are saying it’s you.”

“People say all kinds of stupid stuff!”

“Yes, but after people say stupid stuff, they do stupid stuff. That’s how history happens. That’s why there are people in Beijing really after you.”

She scowled. “There’s a pushback, sure. All kinds of rightist reactionaries, especially in the military. Or maybe that’s not fair. The military usually does what the Party tells it to do. But for sure certain agencies are pushing back hard.”

“Like the censors.”

“Or state security. Or parts of the PLA. Yes.”

“And some of them must think that if they had you in their possession, that would help them.”

“Probably so.”

“Or if you were dead.”

“Probably so.”

Fred regarded her as she stared at her wrist. “So be sure to stay out of the cloud!” he said sharply, surprising both of them. “They can track you from there.”

“Shouldn’t you stay out also?”

“I am—”

The rover’s radio crackled.

“Qi and Fred, it’s Ta Shu here. Listen, you need to leave that rover now. We’re here in the free crater, and we’ve got a Chinese spy program here that has access to channels back home that show your rover has been located by a group that is trying to kill Qi. They’ve launched a missile at your rover, so you need to abandon it immediately!”

“But how?” Qi exclaimed. Then: “Who’s doing this?”

“Red Spear. They’ve got a cell at the moon’s south pole, and they’re sending missiles up from Earth. So listen, there’s a solar storm shelter about two or three kilometers from your current location, two hundred meters off the road you are on, to the left. Seek shelter there.”

“But how—”

“Let’s talk more later! For now, get out of that rover!”

“We need to go,” Fred said to Qi, who was sitting there looking stubborn. “We’re leaving!” he said to Ta Shu, and rose to his feet.

“Shit,” Qi said. Her mouth was pursed into a tight knot, and one hand was on her belly.

“Come on,” Fred said. “You’ll still fit into a spacesuit.”

“I guess.”

“When’s your due date again?”

“I don’t know, I’ve lost track what day it is.”

“It’s October twentieth, but when are you due?”

“October twenty-fourth.”

“Geez,” Fred said. “Well, even so. We have to get out of here.”

“Shit.”

They descended to the rover’s lock room and Fred pulled two spacesuits out of a closet. He gave the largest one he could find to Qi. She just barely got its midsection over her middle; he helped her pull it up to her shoulders. Then they got helmets on, checked each other’s seals, tested the air, and looked at the red heads-up displays on their helmet screens, which reminded Fred of his translation glasses. He kept those with him just in case, putting them in his spacesuit’s big thigh pocket, along with the quantum comms device that Valerie Tong had returned to Qi as she sent them on their way.

When they were ready he felt a bit lunar-competent, although really it was just a case of user-friendly tech. Their suits said they were safe, so they got in the lock and opened the outer door, and were confronted with their first problem: the rover’s automatic pilot was beyond them to alter, and the rover was trundling along at around fifteen kilometers an hour.

“Oh no,” Fred said.

“It’s just a jogging pace,” Qi snapped. “Just step off and start running.”

“No!” Fred said, shocked.

“Just remember the g,” she said, and jumped down.

“Damn,” he said, and stepped off.

He landed on both feet and pushed off forward, but too hard, so that he flew ahead and nearly crashed into the back end of the rover. It rolled out of the way just fast enough for him to avoid rear-ending it, and when he hit the ground again he put one foot forward, using it to thrust back and make a little bunny jump, trying desperately to calculate his push-off correctly. He didn’t; he found himself in the air again, or the non-air, spinning his arms but still angled forward as if diving. There was no way to recover from that tilt, no jerk forward of the feet fast enough, at least not from him. He put his hands out instead and did a face-plant, sprawled over the dust like a kid on a playground. It was a shock, but at one-sixth of his true weight, and protected by his spacesuit, and landing on the smoothed surface of the track, he came to no harm, nor his suit either. Or so it appeared as he clumsily got to his feet and checked the heads-up monitor in his faceplate. All normal, supposedly.

Then he saw that Qi had suffered the same fate as him. There she was behind him, lying facedown on the ground.

“Oh no!” he cried, hopping back to her as if on a pogo stick and crashing to his hands and knees beside her. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was right in his ear. She rolled and sat up, holding her belly in both hands. “I landed right on the kid.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes. Damn, this kid is going to have seen everything.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know! Help me up.”

He stood, grabbed her outstretched hands, both of them awkward in their thick gloves, and precariously they pulled on each other until she was standing too.

“Let’s get to that shelter,” she said.

Two or three kilometers had not sounded like much when Ta Shu had mentioned it in his warning, but as they began to walk, Fred couldn’t help realizing that it was farther than would have been nice. If they had only stayed on the rover another ten minutes, they would have been next to it.

But then the empty rover, by now several hundred meters ahead of them on the road, and thus looking as if it were almost to the horizon, flew apart. No sound, no gout of flames—just explosive dissolution and a giant puff of dust, which shot into space equally in all directions and then slowly drifted to the ground, after which the blackened and twisted wreckage of the rover stood there in the middle of the road like an ancient wreck. A faint plume of ultrafines hung over the thing, then around it. Then all around them flares of dust started jumping out of the moonscape. Pieces of the rover, these had to be, falling lazily back onto the moon and kicking up clouds of dust. A piece could fall right on them, possibly a big piece, and Fred scanned the starry sky overhead to see if he could spot anything, but saw nothing. If they got hit they got hit. At least it would be sudden.

He wanted to say something, but nothing came to him. His tongue was tied. Hers too, it seemed. He could feel his pulse thudding hard and fast in him.

“Damn,” he said at last.

She looked at him through their faceplates, looked away. “Someone’s after us.” Having her voice right in his ear was a strange disjunction, one of several caused by wearing the spacesuits. He could barely see her face through their faceplates, but her voice was right there in his left ear, as he presumed his was in hers.

“Yes,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Apparently so.”

“It means Ta Shu’s information was good. Can you tell him what happened, and ask him if he can find out anything more?”

“When we get to the shelter I can try. I’d also like to know if whoever it is can still see us now, even just walking around. From orbit I mean. Or from Earth for that matter.”

“We better hope not. Come on, let’s get to that shelter.”

She led the way, starting at a good pace, which soon began to flag. “Hell,” she said. “I feel like crap.”

“We’re almost there,” Fred said.

She made a disgusted noise. “Shut up and walk.”

They did that, although walking was not quite the right word for it; on the flat surface of the road it felt easier to lope, or bunny hop, or skip in a kind of syncopated way that kept one foot always ahead. Soon enough they passed the wreckage of their rover; they gave it a wide berth, although they couldn’t not look at it. It was crushed, and it appeared large parts of it had melted. As they got past the thing and walked on, it struck him that the idea that a moon colony could successfully rebel and throw off Earthly control was an absurd fantasy. Also, that Ta Shu and his unknown informant had saved their lives. For a while anyway. It was hard not to feel somewhat killed; his legs were trembling and he felt sick; but Qi was there and he needed to attend to the moment, so he clenched his racing thoughts and focused on walking.

On they skipped. At one point, despite his efforts to focus, their skipping reminded him of Dorothy and her three companions on the yellow brick road, and he wondered if he was Qi’s Tin Man, Scarecrow, or Cowardly Lion. Possibly he was an amalgam of all three—of the weaknesses of all three. Although the point of the story was that their weaknesses had been illusory weaknesses, indeed unrecognized strengths. He tried to take heart from that, but in truth the sight of the blasted rover was so disturbing his thoughts were still completely scattered.

When they passed a boulder that was almost cubical and about waist-high, Qi veered for it and sat down. “I need to rest,” her voice confessed in his ear.

He sat on the far side of the rock. “We’re almost there.”

“Shut up with that!”

But soon she rose to her feet with a groan, and took a few hopping steps down the road; then she stopped and took Fred’s arm as he caught up with her. That almost brought them both down. They were like two drunks trying to get home after a bad night out. She was cursing continuously, or so he assumed by the sound of it.

“What?” he said. “Are you hurt?”

“I think my water has broken,” she said, staring at him through their faceplates for several seconds longer than she would usually make eye contact. It occurred to Fred as he held her gaze that they very seldom made eye contact. All this time together not looking at each other, and now they were. Then she looked away as usual.

“Oh no!” he said helplessly. “Can you still walk?”

“Yes I can still walk! Or I could if it weren’t for this gravity! Let’s go. Let’s try regular walking this time. Very slowly.”

It seemed to Fred that went better, and after a while, during a short rest, he suggested they try going faster. “Try doing a Groucho and see if that’s a bit easier.”

“What’s a Groucho?”

“Didn’t you ever see a Marx Brothers movie? Groucho Marx used to glide around in a weird lowered position. Long strides with his knees bent.”

“I don’t want to bend my knees.”

“Oh. Okay, no bent knees. But let’s try long smooth strides. That’s more like truckin’.” He hadn’t known that he knew so many famous strides of the past.

“Please, just shut up and walk.”

So they tried gliding, and it seemed to Fred both easier on the lungs and less impactful per step. For sure the g lessened all impacts, and they got along pretty well. Once she stopped him and held on to his arm with both hands, bent over at the waist. A shaft of fear shot through him, as no doubt a shaft of pain was shooting through her. This was how disasters started, he saw all of a sudden. You thought you could make it and then you didn’t, and boom, something happened you could never fix or undo.

His suit’s GPS indicated they were no more than a kilometer from the roadside refuge. “We’re almost—”

“Shut up!” And then with a groan she bent over even farther. Hands on knees, shuddering—

“You’re not going to throw up are you?” he asked, remembering that this was supposed to be very dangerous in a spacesuit. “You can’t.”

“Shut up. I’m not going to throw up. It’s a contraction. And don’t say oh no!”

“Okay, but oh my God, we have to get to that shelter.”

“Give me a second, it should pass.”

Then she lost her balance and he caught her and held her from going down, not sure if that was the right move or not. But it was surprisingly easy, and that gave him an idea.

“Here,” he said. “You only weigh about thirty pounds, and so do I. I’ll carry you for a while.”

“Balance,” she objected, and groaned again.

“I know.” He reached an arm down behind her knees and said, “Hop up into my arms. Let me see how that feels.”

She did that and he lifted her up and into him, took a step back to balance her weight against his chest. One arm under her knees, another behind her neck. She had an arm around his neck, and was like no weight at all, or rather a weight like a bag of groceries; a fairly heavy bag of groceries, but nothing like a person. But she still had the mass of a person, as he would have cause to remember if he lost his balance and they started to fall. In his present state of mind, very close to panic, he couldn’t quite remember the laws of mass and weight and velocity and inertia, but he knew from his time on the moon so far that they were tricky nonintuitive problems for a human brain to solve on the fly. He would have to be extremely careful.

He started out slow and stumped steadily along. After a while he felt he had a handle on it and could tell what would happen step by step, if he could just keep to that rhythm.

“How are you feeling?” he asked at one point.

“Bad.”

Their faces were about six inches apart, separated by their helmet faceplates. He kept his gaze ahead, spotted a little road sign on the left side of the track he was following.

“Looks like we’re almost there.”

“Good. I think I can walk now. The contraction is over, if that’s what it was.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

So he let her swing down to her feet, holding on to her shoulders until she was upright and steady. They walked to the road sign, which was in Chinese; she said “Good” and they followed a side track to a mound of lunar rubble with an aluminum door in the side facing them.

The door had a manual handle like a commercial freezer door, and when he opened it they found a lock room, with another door on its far side. This one had a number pad over its handle. Again the instruction panel was in Chinese, but Qi read it and said “Oh good,” and after they closed the outer door and heard the lock aerate, she pressed the zero, and the inner door clicked and she opened it. Another lock, another door, and then they were through and in.

Here they found a functional but adequate space, about the size of a studio apartment. Kitchen nook, tiny bathroom with triangular shower, cabinets filled with supplies, two beds and a table with four chairs filling the living space almost completely.

“Have a seat,” Fred said. “We need to get you comfortable. And I want to turn off all our GPSs.”

She sat on one of the beds and started unlatching her helmet.

Turning off their GPSs turned out to be hard. There weren’t on-off switches in any of the systems, as far as Fred could see; they were more in the nature of little transponders, possibly designed to keep working even if the objects they were part of got smashed in an accident. Black boxes. He had to cut the power to all the gauges in their spacesuits to get their GPSs to stop. In their own wristpads he had to open the backs and detach the wires connecting the GPSs to everything else. Messy brutal hardware surgery, and all the while his attempts to focus were badly hampered by Qi’s muttered curses and outright groans from one of the beds. He knew she would never groan if she could have stopped herself.

While he was disabling the GPSs she got out of her spacesuit, and then her clothes. Shocked, Fred looked to the side until she pulled down the sheets and blankets from one bed and sat down on it and pulled a sheet partway over her. She was not a big woman; her belly seemed about as big as the rest of her.

He had seen the thermostat on the shelter’s control panel when turning the building’s system on. Now he asked her what temperature she would like the room to be, but her vastly irritated “I don’t know, how should I know!” left him with no clue as to what would be best. He guessed warm would be good, and set it for twenty-four degrees, hoping his sense of Celsius relative to Fahrenheit was correct. Actually maybe that was too warm, as he saw her face was sweaty, and it seemed likely that she would only get hotter as her efforts increased. He tapped it down to twenty-one.

He went to her side and told her he had disabled their GPS systems.

“Do you have any medical training?” she non sequitured.

“I took a CPR class once,” he said.

“Shit. I’m not having a heart attack here.”

“I know. But if you do I’ll be prepared. Actually,” Fred said, to forestall her snapping at him, and remembering all of a sudden, “once, when I was staying at a friend’s place, I woke up in the middle of the night because there was this whimpering sound coming from under the couch I was sleeping on. I looked under it and it was a dog giving birth, there was already one puppy out. So I sat there helping her while she had four more.”

“No!” she cried. “Don’t tell me that!”

“Well, it was okay for her. So I think you’ll be fine.”

She kept cursing him, but he did his best to ignore that, and in fact he felt a little reassured by this memory from his past. Birth was a natural process. It happened no matter what the mother wanted or knew about it. Then again, as his mind spun through the years, remembering the few encounters he had had with births of any kind, he recalled a doctor friend of his brother’s telling them that attending to births was the scariest thing he did, because, as he had put it, you were dealing with two healthy people, either or both of whom could die on you.

This memory Fred regretted remembering, but there it was, and it wasn’t going to go away. All he could do was hope things went normally for Qi, no matter the vagaries of her pregnancy, which had included g forces from zero to about four or five, not to mention the descent of a steep urban mountain, a solar flare event, and the recent fall on the road outside. There was little he could do if things went wrong, and there was no hiding that from either of them. Here they were.

He moved one of the shelter’s four chairs next to the bed Qi was on and sat next to her, intending to time her contractions and the intervals between.

Loud beeps came from Fred’s spacesuit and they both startled badly, Fred even leaping to his feet, which of course threw him up into the ceiling. When he had landed and collected himself Qi said, “What was that!”

“It’s probably that unicaster,” Fred remembered. “I brought it with me.” He went to his spacesuit, unzipped the thigh pocket, took out the device. It was heavier than it looked like it should be; the qubit stabilizers were the cause of the extra weight, Fred knew. He turned it on, then took his translation glasses from the spacesuit pocket. He put the glasses on and peered at the screen, which was now filled by a line of Chinese characters. The red scroll read Calling Chan Qi. This is Peng Ling. Calling Chan Qi.

“Whoa!” He handed it over to Qi.

She read it, looked up at Fred, blinking in surprise. “Do you suppose it’s really her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Before this thing was someone claiming to be inside the Great Firewall.”

“Looks like it changed hands.”

“Can they track us here by way of this device?”

“Not instantly. It’s meant to be used for confidential conversations.”

“And no one can overhear us?”

“No. It’s a unicaster, like a phone, and it’s entangled so that if someone tries to listen in the connection will be lost.”

She sighed, pulled the blanket up her chest and caught it under her arms. Fred sat back down in the chair. She hunched over the device and spoke to it in Chinese, sounding peremptory and challenging. On the bottom half of Fred’s glasses he read in red script,

This is Chan Qi. What do you want?

New text appeared after a pause of about six seconds: more Chinese characters on the screen, and now a machine voice speaking in Chinese. Fred saw the line of red sentences overlaid on his vision of Qi’s face, looking sweaty and very intent.

I want your help. We need to work with each other, not against each other.

Qi replied angrily, and the glasses scrolled, Why should I help you? Someone is trying to kill me!

More characters appeared in rapid succession:

It is not me or my people doing that. I need your help. I have just been elected president. We have the fate of China in our hands.

“Wow,” Qi said, glancing up at Fred. “Can it be true?”

He shrugged; he had no idea.

She rolled her eyes, spoke in Chinese.

What about my father? Why was not he elected?

He backed me. The Politburo elected me. He was appointed premier. He will be helping me.

Why should he help you?

We have been working together a long time. I told him I know where you are and I am trying to keep you safe.

Qi spoke angrily. You do not know where I am and the people you sent up here with Ta Shu have been trying to kill me. They are still trying to kill me.

I did not send anyone up with Ta Shu.

The people who joined him said they were from you and they have been chasing us ever since.

They are probably from the military. From Red Spear.

Qi paused to take this in. Then she spoke slowly and emphatically. If that is true, you had better be careful. They will try to kill you too.

We have control of the military. The Central Military Command is backing me.

Qi spoke at more length. I hope that is true. But some people there around you like what Red Spear is doing. They are still doing it. You will not stay president long unless you can control every part of the military and the security services.

This time the delay was longer. Then: I know that. People are helping with that. Someone inside the Great Firewall is broadcasting through all the media here, calling for peaceful negotiations. If you were to ask your people to get off the streets. To go home. That would help too.

Qi shook her head as she read this, spoke sharply. I cannot control the billion.

You can help. You cannot control the billion. I cannot control the military. No one can control these messages from nowhere. No one can control anything. But we can try and if we help each other. If we speak together on this. It might happen we can save many lives.

Qi stared at the screen. Then she hunched over and groaned. Fred’s glasses transcribed this as Ah. When she could speak, she said something brief.

I will do what I can. Let us talk later. I am having a baby now.

Oh I see. Good luck. I will do what I can here. I hope to talk with you again soon.

Tell my father I am okay. Tell him to speak for me. I do not have any way to contact my people anymore.

I can convey to people what you are saying now.

Qi hesitated, groaned again. Ah. Do that then. People. Chan Qi here. Good work so far. Let the new leadership enact the reforms. Stay vigilant. See if the new leadership will represent us. Stay vigilant!

Then she said some last brief thing and handed the device back to Fred.

He ended the transmission, looking through the words Break the red spear.

Then she was groaning again, and Fred bounced off the walls in his attempt to swiftly assemble towels and sheets, also looking under the sink for cups or pots or basins. He saw that it might be possible to disassemble the other bed frame and attach part of it to her bed, where it might serve as something to place her feet against when she started pushing. She cursed that idea when he mentioned it, so he dropped it.

He stood by her during her contractions and held her right hand. She squeezed his hand so hard he had to resist by squeezing back, or else his bones would be broken. She closed her eyes so hard her eyelids went white. She clenched her teeth, she hissed. It was like some extremely intense athletic effort that she could not choose not to make. Like trying to lift five hundred pounds with a leg press. Each time some deeper part of her would eventually realize she couldn’t do it, that it would break her, and only then would her body relent for a while. Then she would get caught up again by another unwilled attempt. Her whole body clenched during these efforts, and watching her Fred became convinced that some resistance for her to push against with her feet would help the effort. So in the interval between contractions he got up and found a tool kit in the closet, then went to the other bed, unscrewed one end of the bedstead, and pulled it out of its sleeving in the horizontal part. He put that bedstead over the middle of her bed, but the bedstead legs were the same width as the frame. This was frustrating, and he slammed the ends of the bedstead against the floor, launching himself a bit each time, until they were bent far enough inward that he could jam them down inside her mattress frame, leaving a bar like a football field’s goalposts there over her bed.

That gave her something, and when the next contraction came she put her feet up on the crossbar of the inserted bedstead without him asking, and grunted as she pushed, but even with his whole weight pressing against it, shoving back against her effort as hard as he could, he couldn’t keep her from kicking the bedstead down into him until he was jammed between it and her bed’s bedstead, and her legs were almost straight. “Shit,” he said as he extricated himself.

“No shit,” she said.

“How are you coming?”

“Hurts. Get that thing to stay in place, I think it will help.”

“Okay.” He rummaged in the tool chest, ransacked the cabinets. He was bouncing around the room like a pinball, but nothing. Nothing but a roll of duct tape. “Shit. Okay, tell me where you want it.” He held up the roll for her to see.

“Damn,” she said. “Okay, worth a try. Put it about here,” and she held her legs up in the air, feet only a bit farther toward the end of the bed than her bottom. He put the bedstead in that position and then duct-taped both ends to the frame in a crisscross pattern, many turns on each side.

Right about when he was finishing that, and beginning to think the room was far too warm, another contraction clutched her. It had been about four minutes. Now she had something to brace her feet against, but it was only braced at the fulcrum, down below her mattress; he had to hold the upper part in position against her pushing. He couldn’t do it; not even close. The duct tape held but twisted, and she pushed the top bar over no matter how hard he threw his body against it. “Damn,” he said. “You’re strong.”

She shook her head, red-faced and sweating. “The contractions are strong. Can you see any changes? Any progress.”

He gulped and took a look between her legs, put the blanket back over her. “Dilated,” he said, guessing. He hadn’t seen any rubber gloves in the cabinets inside the closet, and didn’t want to put his fingers inside her anyway; he had no idea what to do, how or what to measure, he could only mess things up. They were stuck with nature alone.

“I don’t think my feet up helps,” she said. “I want to try pulling on the bar with my arms instead.”

This meant the pressure on the bar would come from the opposite side, so before her next contraction Fred duct-taped the bar in long loops to the foot of her bed. Then she had another contraction, and pulled herself up on the bar.

“Damn!” she exclaimed when she was done. Then she was laughing and crying at the same time, puffing in and out as if after some desperate sprint.

“Was that better?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should squat,” she said. “I read that’s one way to do it. Squat in the shower or something.”

“Would that work in this gravity? Wouldn’t you just stand up when the contractions hit?”

“Maybe so.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to stand anyway.”

“I could try to help you keep your balance.”

“No.”

“If you were crouching I could hold you down.”

“No you couldn’t.” Then her eyes squeezed shut white and she began again, pulling herself up from the bar trembling over her.

“Big breaths,” he said. “Push on the out breath, relax when you breathe in. Push hard.” In fact he had no idea. He didn’t even know what he was saying.

This time the new arrangement allowed her to push in a way she seemed to want. Her thighs banded and trembled. Her body arched until only the back of her head was touching the bed. In the midst of her huffing and puffing she yelped, and Fred jumped in surprise, flying backward in a slow arc to the floor. He returned to her side, held her shoulders. Lunar g was not enough for her now. She was clenching her fists, they were as white as her eyelids. It was good he wasn’t holding hands with her at that moment, his hand would have been crushed for sure.

When that contraction relented, she relaxed back onto the bed, sucked air until she had caught her breath. He went to the sink and wet a towel with water, returned to wipe her forehead and smooth her hair back. Her skin was glowing and she radiated heat. “That felt a little better,” she said. “Any progress?”

He checked her out again, and there between her legs was a round opening several centimeters across, filled with black—the top of the baby’s head, its hair wet.

“Crown!” he said, understanding the use of the word in this context for the first time. “I see the crown!”

“Good. It’s coming out headfirst.”

“Yes.”

After that things went in a blur. Her contractions hit one after the next, and the idea that this was some kind of athletic event she couldn’t refuse began to look wrong; this had gone beyond athletics into something pitiless and superhuman. He risked holding her hand, took the pain and squeezed back as hard as he could. He held his breath, he counted, he said things that neither of them heard. He was completely there and completely not there; he was so terrified he felt nothing. She cried out during each contraction now, which was obviously easier than trying not to cry out. All of it was so involuntary. After each push her baby’s head was farther out of her, and eventually he had to lift it up and move it farther down the towel he had placed under her hips. That slight flare of her hips was going to save them. Clearly there should have been a basin there or something. He was feeling more and more dissociated; things were happening too fast because they were going too slowly; things were both completely bizarre and completely natural at the same time. Despite his fear, it resembled that time with the dog under the couch. It was simply the way things worked, the way they all came into the world. His electrified calm was as bizarre as all the rest of it—not dissociation, instead an unknown new feeling, filling him right to the skin. They were animals. Mammals in action. There wasn’t enough gravity. He drank a cup of water, got her to take a sip when she was in a break.

When the child’s red and black head was entirely outside her, he said, “Okay, the head’s out, the hard part’s over, let’s get the shoulders out on this next push and you’ll be done,” and he wanted to help somehow with this, but still didn’t know what to do; it wasn’t a situation where you could just pull on the kid’s head, at least so it seemed to him. Some waiting was involved, which was hard, but necks were fragile. He was holding his breath, and when he noticed that and tried to breathe, he could hardly do it. Was this joy or terror? Could there be some previously unsuspected combination of the two?

She nodded to show she had heard him, eyes clenched shut, breathing hard in and out. Gasping. Her face was red, her hair drenched with sweat, body everywhere glowing and sweaty. Gasping to catch her breath!

Then the next push shoved the kid’s shoulders out of her, and he had to move fast to pull off the added bed frame to make room for it. Then he flew to the sink, crashing into it and hurting his forearm again. Ignoring that, he washed his hands and went back and pulled the baby out gently by its head and shoulders, making use of Qi’s next contraction, twisting the babe a bit to the side so that out it slid, coated with bloody fluids, it was a naked little mess, it wasn’t breathing, its umbilical cord still ran blackly up into Qi.

“Okay it’s out,” he exclaimed, and turned it over on the bloody wet towel. “She’s out. It’s a girl.”

Immediately Qi leaned forward and took up the girl into her arms. “Cut the umbilical cord about five centimeters away from her,” Qi said urgently, staring at her child. “Tie it off first before you cut it, tie each side of the cut spot. Quick as you can.”

“Tie it with what!” Fred exclaimed.

“Anything! Hurry!”

He hopped over and got the duct tape and scissors, nearly flying past the cabinet into the closet. He got back to her and swiftly pulled and cut lengths of duct tape, then wrapped them tight around the slippery umbilical cord, which was a reddish black and twisty like a braided rope under a sheath. He cut between the wraps. It bled when he cut it but only a little. Then Qi sat back with the baby in her arms, one hand behind the babe’s head, another under her back. The baby was even more red-faced than Qi—eyes open, brown eyes, looking astounded. A grin split his face, though he was still terrified.

Qi sat back a little; Fred stuffed a pillow from the other bed behind her head and shoulders. She gave the baby a quick hard squeeze and shake. Nothing. Qi turned her head downward and shook her again, scooped a finger in her mouth, slapped her lightly on the butt. The baby suddenly snorted and then choked and breathed out then in, and then wailed. Qi and Fred shared a quick relieved look. Now all three of them were astounded. Qi folded her in her arms and held her. For a second they were in a space together, all three weeping or laughing, it was hard to tell; it was a moment. The two women were a mess. Then suddenly Qi bent forward again, in the grip of another contraction. “Just keep holding her,” Fred said, and attended to the dark goop coming out of her, putting down another towel under her bottom. “It’s the placenta I guess.”

“Ah good. Don’t eat it.”

“Okay I won’t.”

The clench relented, and Qi lay back again with the baby on her chest. The babe was goopy but breathing, eyes open then shut, tiny hands clenching Qi’s fingers, mouth already groping aimlessly around.

“Should I try to feed her already?” Qi said.

“I don’t know. It seems quick, but I don’t know.”

“What, you’ve never dealt with a newborn before?”

“No!”

She smiled, a smile he had never seen before, which seemed only right. Relief—immense relief—that was that smile. Cosmic relief. He smiled back and patted her on the head. “Good job, mom. Let’s get her cleaned up a little, maybe wrapped in a towel, and then just put her there on you where she can latch on if she wants to. I think she’ll probably do what’s right for her. We all seem programmed to do that.”

“Do you think?”

Carefully he wiped some of the fluids off the babe and Qi’s arms and chest, using yet another towel wetted with warm water. They were devastating this shelter’s linens. “There you go. Best I can do right now.”

“It’s good. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Actually Fred had been thinking she was the weirdest little creature he had ever seen, on par with a possum or an aardvark. He said, “Yes, very beautiful.”

Qi laughed, a little bit out of control. “Okay, she’s going to be beautiful. Ah God, I hope she doesn’t turn out to be some kind of gibbon.” A sudden spasm of fear squeezed her face, like a late contraction. Aha, Fred thought: welcome to parenthood!

“Gibbons are great,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”

“Maybe. Maybe so.” Suddenly she was weeping.

“It’s okay,” Fred said, brushing her hair off her forehead. Both women needed more cleaning up, and so did their bed. He went to the sink and soaked some more towels. “She’s going to be fine.”

Fred got them as cleaned up as he could, and gave Qi some pain meds he found in the shelter’s first aid box. She tossed them down and drank three cups of water. He lay down on the other bed, and briefly all three of them fell asleep.

When he woke he had to pee, so he went into the little bathroom to do that. As he was finishing he heard Qi cry out desperately, “Fred! Where are you!” and he rushed out to her, heart thudding in his chest.

“What is it?” he exclaimed, imagining trouble with the baby.

“Oh there you are!” she said, twisting to look at him. “I thought you were gone!”

“No,” he said, nonplussed.

She reached out and grabbed him by the hand. “You’ll stay with me?”

“Of course.”

“Good!” She heaved a great juddering sigh. “Because I need you.”

The baby girl was wrapped in a towel and lying across Qi’s lap. Now she woke, and Qi shifted her up and she began to nurse like a kitten, eyes closed as she sucked rhythmically and hard on Qi’s breast. “Is she getting anything?” Qi asked.

“You’re asking me?” Fred said. “What does it feel like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anything’s coming.”

“There must be. Look, you can see a little milk come out of the nipple after she comes off.”

“Good.” She grimaced at one little bite as the babe latched on.

“Does it hurt?”

“I guess a little. Actually, after what just happened, I don’t know if anything will ever hurt again.”

“They say you forget.”

“I hope so.”

At a certain point the baby peed and pooped into her towel wrap, and Fred realized he would have to cut up some towels to use as diapers. Possibly the already bloodied towels could be washed out enough to make them suitable for diapers. He began to think about optimal shapes for a diaper. Some kind of triangle, or maybe an X. The babe’s first stool was black and tarry, and he worried there might be something wrong with her. She had been through a strange nine months. It seemed like the possibilities for problems were very real. And there would be no way of knowing about a lot of them for a long time to come. And she did look odd, somewhat like the baby primates he had sometimes watched in zoos.

But they were primates. Kissing cousins to the other primates, with obvious family resemblances, especially when newborn. Actually this girl looked nothing like other primates, he was just fooled by her size and the redness of her skin; she even bore a resemblance to Qi in the shape of her mouth. She would be fine. Hopefully. There was no way to know, and no point in worrying about it now. This last thought seemed like something he could say to Qi, if she brought it up again. But then he stopped himself. Worry about it later—never a welcome piece of advice, now that he thought of it. When you suggested to people who were worrying that they worry about it later: that was never well received. He finally saw that. He even saw why it might be that way.

“What are you going to name her?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What about the, you know, are you going to, I mean, is there any place for the father in all this?”

“Oh I don’t want to talk about that.”

He watched her for a while. “Are you sure?”

“I am sure. It was a mistake.”

“Well—”

“It was a mistake!”

“Okay.”

While the babe slept on Qi’s chest, they started listening to Qi’s radio feed. Everywhere the crises were still ongoing. At first this seemed strange, then they realized that only a day or less had passed since they had last paid attention. In the US, Congress had finished nationalizing the major banks, and the markets were in free fall. Currency controls had been slapped in place to keep dollars from fleeing to other countries or into cryptocurrencies. Demonstrators and some legislators were demanding a universal basic income, guaranteed healthcare, free education, and the right to work, all supported by progressive taxation on both income and capital assets. Supporters of this program were in the streets; opponents were calling it a catastrophic mutiny of the irresponsible half of the citizenry. Media had so much content to report there was hardly time to froth over it. But it seemed still that armed violence caused by all the disruption was minimal. People were in the streets, but mainly to celebrate a return to democracy, or object to it. It was hard to shoot such crowds.

In that fundamental sense, it was the same in China. The army and security forces were so far holding off, taking their positions and then remaining in place without further actions. It looked like the strategy used in Hong Kong was being tried again: just wait until people got tired and went home. No more May Thirty-fifths. Whether it would work this time no one could tell. Many people were in fact leaving the big demonstration in Beijing. Recently another manifesto had appeared on every screen in the country, a botware storm that again appeared to have originated within the Great Firewall. In stilted antique language, reminiscent of Mao Zedong or Sun Yat-sen, or even Confucius or Laozi, the previous iterations of reform lists had now become the Seven Great Reforms: return of the iron rice bowl, legal standing for the ecologies of China, reform of the hukou system, an end to the Great Firewall, full equality for women, an end to gross income inequality, and the return of the Party to the people.

“Interesting,” Qi said. Some of these demands, she told Fred, would be supported by urban youth, some by the rural populace, some by the migrant workers, some by intellectuals and the prosperous business class. Netizens or farmers or migrants, everyone wanted something from the Party, and no one outside the Party was convinced that it had been doing the best it could. President Xi had made valiant attempts to right the ship, some said, but after him there had been too much infighting to replace him, too much corruption, too much controlocracy, too little action on behalf of the people. The Chinese people were sick of it, things had to change. And there was a long Chinese tradition of going out and overrunning the authorities—a tradition three thousand years old at this point. Young people who had never experienced such a revolutionary moment seemed to have a desire for it. This too was part of the China Dream, Qi explained.

Fred shook his head. “It sounds awful.”

“What do you mean?” Qi said. “It sounds great.”

“You might want it if you’ve never seen it, but then if you get it, you won’t want it.”

“Revolution?”

“Chaos and disorder.”

“But the order was bad. The order was disorder. Think of it as dynastic succession on a global scale. The old world order was wrecking everything, so this had to happen. After these troubles there’ll be a sorting out, and then a better order will come into being.”

Fred shrugged, looking at an image on his wristpad of the National Mall in Washington, DC, packed with millions of people. Inspiring? Frightening? He wasn’t sure.

“I’m hungry,” Qi said. “How much food does this place have?”

“There’s quite a lot. It’s all dried or frozen or canned.”

“That’s all right. But what will we do when it’s gone?”

“I don’t know. Hopefully Ta Shu will figure out something, him and those Americans he was with. Someone who will help us.”

“If it comes to it, we’ll have to call for help. With some margin to spare, in terms of food and air.”

“Ta Shu knows we’re here.”

Then, as if called up by one of the old man’s dragon arteries, the station’s control panel pinged three times. Fred tapped it and Ta Shu’s voice was suddenly there with them.

“Fred and Qi, hello! Sorry to say this, but our China source is telling us that you’ve been found again. The people who destroyed your rover intend to do the same to the shelter you’re in. You need to leave there immediately.”

“We can’t!” Fred objected. “We don’t have anywhere to go, and we have no way to get there! And Qi’s had her baby!”

“Nevertheless! Be that as it may! You still need to get out! All this turmoil at home is causing a really violent backlash. It’s a big fight, and you’re in the crosshairs.”

“What about Peng Ling?” Qi asked loudly. “Is she on our side or is she trying to kill us?”

“She’s on your side. I talked to her!” He sounded very happy as he said this. “Your father is working with her, and they’re working together with others to secure the army and make sure the entire security apparatus is backing her and the new standing committee. That’s going pretty well, they say, which only means the rightists still on the loose are getting more and more desperate. They’re trying to eliminate their enemies at the top, as a last chance at success. Peng herself has had to move to a secure location. You need to do the same, because there are people in China who want you dead.”

“But I’m not even in contact with anyone!” Qi cried.

“It doesn’t matter. The Red Spear is being crushed, so they’re lashing out. They can’t retaliate against the demonstrators in the streets, so they’re going for the leaders of their enemies, and you’re part of that. And they found out where you are.”

“But we can’t get away!” Fred said. “The rover we were in was demolished.”

“I know. My friends here say those roadside shelters always have little motorbikes in their storage lockers, for moving from one shelter to the next in emergencies like this. And there are spacesuits in all the refuges.”

“For a baby?”

“No of course not. But it will fit in a regular one, I guess. Fred, listen to me: you have to get out of there. The missiles are already on their way.”

“What! From where?”

“From Earth. They were launched yesterday, so time is short. You have to leave.”

“Shit.”

Fred and Qi looked at each other. So much eye contact, after all those weeks avoiding it! It was a very quick mode of speech, they were finding. Now they saw immediately that they were in agreement: they had to get out.

“Fred, listen to me. Take the motorbikes, and ride south on that road ninety-seven kilometers to a mine station called Rümker. There’s a freight launch rail there, and the facility includes a passenger pod that can be loaded onto the rail. We can walk you through that and get you launched.”

“But where will this pod go?”

“It depends on when you take off. Right now that doesn’t matter. We’ll track you after you launch and someone will come get you. For now you just need to get off the moon as fast as you can. Anywhere is safer than here. Since they know where you are, nowhere on the moon will be safe for you.”

“Do you think Peng can get control of the situation?” Fred asked.

“I hope so, but she hasn’t done it yet. Until that gets resolved, keeping you alive is up to us. So get out of there. Leave as soon as you can.”

With that Ta Shu cut out without warning. No goodbye, just a click.

Fred and Qi stared at each other, then at Qi’s baby.

“Shit!” Fred said. “So sorry about this!”

“It’s my fault,” Qi said. “It’s me they’re trying to kill.”

“But why? I thought you said you weren’t the leader.”

“I’m a symbol. I made myself a symbol. I’ve worked for this for years, and a lot of people know that.”

“So you think we should leave.”

“We have to! I believe what Ta Shu is telling us, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“He was right last time.”

“Yes.”

“So we have to leave.”

Fred didn’t want it to be true, but there it was. “Yes.”

She sat up, turned and put her feet on the floor, stood up carefully beside her bed, winced.

Seeing this Fred said, “How are you doing?”

“Not good,” she said.

Now that they were no longer in her moment of extremity, she didn’t want to talk to him about that, he could see. But if they were going to be riding some kind of lunar motorbike, well—it struck him as a terrible idea. But there wasn’t any other option. She was tough, and she hadn’t been bleeding onto the bed for a while now; the latest towels he had put under her were still almost clean. So hopefully that would be all right. Maybe the motorbike had a sidecar.

They found a wardrobe full of spacesuits next to the air lock, and pulled a few out. Qi investigated the possibility of fitting her baby into her spacesuit with her, but it didn’t look like that would work; the babe would be trapped below the helmet ring, and there would be no way to reach her directly down there. Nor enough room to keep from squishing her. Nor a steady supply of air. Qi cursed and began poking around in one of the station’s spacesuits, sticking her arm up through the helmet ring and the like. Fred went down a hallway and found the storage room containing the motorbikes Ta Shu had mentioned. No sidecars, but luckily they were not actually motorbikes but rather motored tricycles, with two wheels in back, and a long duo of seats made to hold two or even three people. Their batteries were plugged into the wall, and there must have been a photovoltaic solar panel on the roof of the shelter, because the batteries’ gauges showed they were all fully charged. Emergency transport, as Ta Shu had said, and so always ready. Suitable for getting from one shelter to the next, if there were no other options. As now.

Fred unplugged one trike’s battery and wheeled it into the main room. Its rear axle was short, sized to fit through the doors and air lock. They could both sit on it. Fred could drive while Qi held her baby in her arms. It seemed like it might work.

“How does it look for getting her into a spacesuit?” he asked.

“Scary.”

“But you can do it?”

“I guess we have to.” Her face was set in the masklike expression Fred had seen so often in China, now grimmer than ever. “Let me nurse her one more time, see if I have any milk. We’re going to have to keep her in her suit until we get to another shelter.”

“I know. Ninety-seven kilometers, he said. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“It better not.”

She sat and offered the babe a breast and the girl latched on hungrily. Fred got into his spacesuit from the rover and toggled through its gauges, saw that he had wrecked them when he had disabled its GPS. A pointless exercise. He pulled out one of the station’s spacesuits and checked it out. Looked like it had air for seventy-two hours, hopefully well more than they would need. “We should wear these,” he told Qi. They would be GPSed again, but it couldn’t be helped. He pulled one of the suits on, then a helmet; snapped it onto the suit, turned everything on. Again it all checked out. He got the trike into the air lock.

Qi pulled the babe off, and with a kiss to her forehead inserted her headfirst into a spacesuit helmet, which she had lined with a towel around the back side, so that the girl now lay on a kind of pillow. She stared up through her faceplate, a very unnerving sight, evoking some dreamlike or cinematic memory, maybe the star child from the end of 2001, but also various horror-film nightmares. Qi’s face had turned to stone. She pulled the spacesuit up over the girl’s legs and snapped suit to helmet. The suit was nearly empty, so that Qi could fold up the legs, then on Fred’s suggestion wrap them with duct tape to make sure they didn’t inflate when they aerated the suit. The resulting pad could be used as a kind of cushion under the helmet. She would be able to hold the whole arrangement in her arms, though it made a bulky package.

Qi then got into her suit, and they checked each other’s seals. They turned on her suit and the baby’s suit. All seemed well. Qi carried her girl as if in a wad of swaddling clothes, and they went to the air lock. They crowded in with the trike, closed the inner door, opened the outer door, felt the draft of air fly out into the vacuum. Fred pushed the trike by the handlebars out onto the lunar surface.

When they were outside, Qi handed Fred the baby and got on the backseat of the trike, hissing as she did so. Again he was hearing her voice in his left ear, a weirdly intimate disjunction of the senses: she was inside his head again.

“Do you want to ride sidesaddle?” he asked her.

“No. Wait—yes.”

She got off and got on again sitting sideways. Fred gave her the baby and swung his leg over the seat in front of them. Electric motor. Accelerator on the right handlebar, as on a snowmobile. In fact the trike resembled a skeletal snowmobile, now that he thought of it. He tried to give them the easiest start possible, keeping his feet on the ground until the trike began to move. It moved, he lifted his feet onto the running boards, and off they went. Qi reached her right arm around his waist and clung hard to him. The babe was cradled in her left arm and Fred could feel the babe’s spacesuit boots shoving him in the back.

He drove them slowly back toward the main road, scared to death he would somehow tip them over or toss Qi off. The two rear wheels kept that from happening. Possibly a tricycle was more like a car than a motorcycle, in terms of stability. But it was a narrow trike and the g was lunar. Twisting the handlebar gently, which gave the thing a bit more speed, made it feel a little easier to steer. He tested the turn of the handlebars by making a few gentle S-turns, feeling the resistances and balances. The fact that they were on a smoothed roadway helped. Being in one-sixth normal gravity seemed helpful in some ways, dangerous in others, but he couldn’t be sure what was what, and didn’t want to test any aspect of it. Were they balanced, was he balancing them? It was harder to tell than he would have liked.

He rode them onto the main road and turned left as gently as he could, which resulted in him almost running them off the far side of the road. He completed the turn just before that happened, straightened their course. No disasters so far. Now only ninety-five kilometers to go.

It was near midday. Even seen through the heavily polarized and tinted faceplate of his helmet, the landscape was ablaze. The few shadows remaining were like cracks in white porcelain. If they had been riding cross-country they would have been doomed to tip over, no matter the extra tricyclic balance; he couldn’t see well enough to discern bumps and dips in time to avoid them. On the road it was easier, being nearly flat, though they did jounce side to side pretty often. The road was also reliably hard—not as solid as asphalt, but about like packed gravel, and sprayed with a fixative. When he took a brief glance back over his shoulder, he saw that a small dust plume was lofting behind them despite the fixative, hanging there in testament to the light g and the fineness of the dust that covered everything. But it was behind them, and Fred was happy to ride away from it into the blasted clarity of the road ahead.

Unseen bumps sometimes cast them hard to the side, and then he had to steer back the other way without too much of a panic or he would overcompensate them into a fall. Sometimes Qi’s arm around his waist clutched so hard it felt like she was trying to cut him in half. It was very hard to remember that everything had to be done about one-sixth as emphatically as it would have been done on Earth. That kind of touch took a lot of athleticism, and he hadn’t been a great athlete on Earth, not an athlete at all in fact, never comfortable on bikes or snowmobiles, and never once in his life on a motorcycle, a mode of conveyance he had always considered ridiculously dangerous. And yet here he was, gripping the handlebars as hard as he could and trying to see the road surface through the tint of his faceplate and the blinding glare. Too often it felt like the wheels under him were not quite in contact with the ground.

The speedometer embedded in the handlebar dashboard said they were going forty kilometers an hour, and that felt a bit too fast, with the view ahead jouncing toward him, and the thing between his legs and under his hands vibrating and bucking—but he was in a hurry. Grimly he held the throttle in place and rode the dips and bumps as best he could. Despite the rapid succession of little panics jolting through him, they were not actually coming very close to tipping over. Although one time they went over an unseen bump and the whole vehicle launched off the ground and flew without warning, scaring him; but quickly enough they came down, and he jerked the handlebars through the teeny adjustments that felt necessary to keep going straight ahead, and on they went. He kept holding his breath for too long at a time.

Qi had turned the baby’s suit microphone on, and he could hear the girl crying. Qi cursed, and Fred rode on a bit faster. But this made the ride jouncier, and after a while Qi said, “Stop for a minute.”

Fred slowed the bike, and at that very moment it hit a dip he didn’t see; they tilted hard left and he put his leg out to hold them up. A flash of fear that he would break his leg dissipated when his foot struck the ground and almost pushed them over the other way. He had to turn right to compensate for that, then left again to straighten out—finally the trike came to a halt, and he got both feet on the ground.

They had slewed sideways across the road such that they could see the low plume of dust they were leaving behind them. Then Fred saw a much taller plume farther back, a brilliant white cloud billowing up into the black sky. “Oh my God,” Fred said.

“What!”

“Look behind us.”

Qi had been looking into the faceplate of the baby’s suit. Now she looked at the tall cloud, which originated over the horizon behind them and was spreading at its top like a fountain of water falling onto itself, rather than the iconic nuclear cloud or an afternoon thunderhead.

“Is that our shelter?” Qi said.

“I think so.”

“It looks like Ta Shu’s informant is reliable. Damn. I can’t see into her suit very well, so I don’t think she can see me either.”

“Do you think she can see anything?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not, with the faceplates between us.”

“Should we get going then?”

“Yes.”

Fred got them underway again without tipping over or driving off the road. He was feeling a bit more used to their balance, and the trike’s controls. Off they hummed. Shelter behind them destroyed. Someone shooting at them with missiles. Ta Shu had said one had come from Earth, maybe both, Fred couldn’t remember. If Qi’s enemies had any weapons on the moon, or in lunar orbit, and could locate them on the trike, then they could still be a target. If their enemies were shooting at them from Earth, presumably they had a day or two before another one struck, unless they were coming up in a string. Anything was possible. This mine they were heading for could have a security system in it. Smart bombs could be headed their way, keyed to some GPS implanted in Qi long ago, or recently put in something she had swallowed in her food—or stuck into Fred while he had been in the hospital—who knew! Out here on this blinding desert floor their exposure felt infinite. There was nothing to be done but to stay on the run, with as little instrumentation as possible. Stay a moving target. The trike no doubt had GPS too, activated when it was operating or on all the time. Fred’s mind spun through various paranoid death spirals as he drove, and these thoughts seemed to twist his hand on the throttle without him being able to stop it, until they were going a lot faster than what would have made him comfortable in ordinary circumstances. They could so easily tip over! But he couldn’t bear to slow down.

And actually, going faster seemed to make balancing the trike easier in some ways. They blew through dips and flew over lumps, but their momentum always cast them forward. It was hard to know how far he could push that in a situation where no mistakes were allowed. Now they were going fifty-five kilometers per hour. Fred tried to stick to about eighty percent of the highest speed he felt he could handle, just in case. Even so, Qi’s voice said in his ear: “Be careful!”

“I will.”

“Saving ten minutes doesn’t matter. Even an hour.”

“I know.”

He didn’t know, but he let back on the throttle a bit. The trike hummed between his legs. For Qi this vibration had to be bad. And yet as he drove she gave him bits of news she was hearing through her helmet’s radio; she had been contacted by the people now with Ta Shu, she said. Fred was happy not to be hearing anything of that, as he needed to stay focused on riding the trike. “Don’t tell me now,” he said. Nevertheless her voice kept up a running commentary in his left ear. He could barely understand it. New standing committee had reconfirmed Peng as president, general secretary, and head of the military. She had made an appearance in Chengdu, which was surprising to Qi. Run the country by doing the unexpected, she said, isn’t that what the Dao advised? Or was it by doing the expected? She couldn’t remember. And the Party wasn’t Daoist anyway. But Ta Shu was Daoist, Fred thought. Maybe Ta Shu was the one orchestrating these moves. Then he had to dodge a stone on the road.

“Please,” Fred begged.

Qi went on nattering. Return of the iron rice bowl, of course! Reform of hukou, of course, but listen to her, people don’t want shantytowns outside every city do they? People have to have a proper home! As for the Great Firewall, there’s no such thing she says! The Chinese Internet is self-regulating, everyone knows that! Just Chinese patriots doing what is best! So many high citizen scores, people giving a hundred and ten percent, oh come on! Give me a break!

“Quit it!” Fred told her. “I have to concentrate.”

“It’s just I can’t stand it. She’s taking over same as all of the rest. But wait, what’s this.…” Qi was quiet for a while and then she laughed outright. “I can’t believe it! That person I was talking to on that quantum phone has just given every person in the world a million carboncoins and invited them to join a global householders’ union, and something like four billion people have already joined!”

“Please,” Fred said. Then, curious: “What will that do?”

“I have no idea! The backlash to it has already started. Peng doesn’t know what to do about it, no one does!”

“Things will work out. How is the baby?”

“She seems to be asleep. I can’t believe it.”

“Better than having her crying.”

“I’d rather have her crying,” Qi said.

“Babies sleep a lot. Don’t worry.”

“What if there’s another solar storm?”

“Then we’re cooked.”

“What if there’s another missile attack?”

“Then we’re blown up! But we’re almost there.”

“Stop saying that!”

“But we are. Stop talking, please.”

But she didn’t. She couldn’t. He realized as he tried to ignore her and keep his focus on the road that she would never stop, that he would always be hurtling along trying to keep up with her, that everything would always be excruciatingly interesting all the time, the three of them buffeted by fate in all the ways he had worked his entire life to avoid. When the trike’s odometer said they had traversed ninety kilometers, Qi said, “Ta Shu is on my radio, he says we’re soon to come to a big parking lot. Go across it to the building on the left, that’s the terminal. The pod will be in there. They’ll launch us from where they are.”

“Okay,” Fred said.

“Who are you working with?” Qi said, apparently to Ta Shu. Then after a pause: “Can you trust them?”

“Who is it?” Fred asked.

“Be quiet!” Then after a while she said, “But how are these strikes coming so fast?”

“They’re coming in a string,” Fred said aloud.

After a while she said to Fred, “That’s right. He says they launched this one yesterday and are aiming it as it goes. We have to get off the moon as soon as we can.”

“We are! They’re handling our launch, you said?”

“Yes, he said everything is ready. The pod is at the very back of the terminal. He said be sure to be lying back and facing straight ahead.”

“Eyeballs in,” Fred said grimly.

“He said maybe I can give the baby mouth-to-mouth and more air will be pushed into her from me than gets pushed out of her. It’s a freight launch, but he said this pod will be dialed back to human speed.”

“Good,” Fred said.

Over the horizon reared some low peaky hills, different from the usual crater rim arc. Fred accelerated the bike, ignoring Qi’s order to slow down. At the foot of the hills he spotted the cubical shapes that indicated buildings. Aside from the knot of hills, the white plain blazed flatly to the horizon in every direction. Everything white on white. Fred sped up more. They came to the parking lot Ta Shu had mentioned and he aimed for the building on the far left. Stopped right in front of an air lock door. Qi got off with her baby in her arms. Fred got off. Into the air lock, into the terminal. Very dark in there, until their pupils adjusted to the absence of sunblast. Then it was just a dim empty space, unoccupied, like some abandoned subway station. Big piste of a magnetic rail running down the middle of the building in a long glass-walled room of its own, stretching out of the structure and off to the horizon. They hurried to the back of the terminal, where the piste split into various closed doors. Fred chose the one at the very back, tapped on the door panel and it slid up, revealing a squat little rectangular spaceship, like a rover car. Its door opened even before he could tap on it, and they got in and closed the outer door. Inside they found a small cabin with several thick chairs in it, like recliner chairs. The ship’s systems were on. Fred and Qi took off their helmets, and Qi unsnapped the baby’s helmet and pulled her out of it and held her close. The babe was crying, she clutched to Qi with her tiny fists. Qi sat down heavily with her in one recliner. Fred sat in another recliner, then got up again and picked up Qi’s helmet and spoke into it.

“Ta Shu, we’re in the passenger pod, ready when you are.”

He sat down in the chair, grabbed an arm and pulled himself down into it. The little spaceship lurched forward. Quickly it was out of its room and on the piste. Thick little oval side windows showed nothing but the terminal’s walls. Then the surface of the moon, white as the big bang, moving by them faster and faster. They were shoved back in their chairs. Fred felt the gel under him give and give until there was no more to give. He was crushed against it until it felt like concrete, concrete scooped to the shape of his body. The babe was wailing, then she stopped. Maybe Qi was giving her mouth-to-mouth. Fred couldn’t look, he could barely take a breath. All his effort had to go to sucking in air and then holding on. His vision blurred. The world went from too bright to too dark. He felt conscious but besieged. The world went blacker and blacker, his whole body squished, it was a struggle to breathe or even to hold his breath, even to hold his muscles tight enough to keep his ribs from cracking. His body became one big shout of pain. Little choked yelps of protest came from the babe, who was not to be silenced by a mere several g’s. Possibly it was not that much different from her passage out of Qi. Life just one crushing after another. Qi too called out something wordless.

Then the pressure went abruptly away. Fred sucked in hard, shook his head, gasped hard, sucked in air. He sat up. Everything was blurry. They hadn’t even been strapped in. Out the window he saw only black space and stars. Weightlessness: he was floating up, he grabbed his seat arm again, he pulled himself to the window and looked out. White moon behind them, shrinking fast, a bone against the night. Qi’s child wailed, music to his ears, drilling like a fire alarm right down his spinal cord.

“How’s the baby?” he asked.

“She seems all right. Where are we headed?”

“I don’t know.”