She glanced at him, wondering. She squeezed his hand. “Here come my friends,” she warned under her breath.
A couple passed behind them and Qi followed them, tugging the stunned Fred behind her. Out of the park on the far side of the lake, into an alley, then into a shop selling all kinds of plastic household goods, bowls and cups and so on, stacked to the ceiling on every shelf and in every possible nook, such that one had to walk sideways to get between them. Then up a narrow staircase and through a doorway, with the door quickly closed behind them and some people from the shop. At that point Qi and the others fell on each other. She hugged each in turn, all of them talking at once.
Qi eventually stopped and said to them in English, “This is Fred, he helped me get here. He was in trouble on the moon too.”
“Nice to meet you,” everyone said, almost in unison. They laughed at that; it was one of their first English-class phrases, they let him know, now finally put to use. For most of them it proved to be all they could say in English. Those who knew more invited him to sit down, asked him if he wanted tea. Their English was not as good as Qi’s, and seemed neither British nor American in accent, something more purely Chinese, angled a bit perhaps by the accent of whoever had taught them. Classroom English, used for a job, maybe, but never lived in. Suddenly Fred could hear better the fact that Qi had lived some of her life in English, and for quite some time too. Presumably in those Swiss boarding schools. An international person, a worldly person.
He answered their questions as best he could, feeling completely exhausted. He didn’t want to say he had been accused of murder on the moon; in this context it would sound absurd, horrible. Qi seemed to see this, and steered the conversation away from him and toward their next move. They were not to stay with these friends long; there were chaoyangqunzhong everywhere, they said, and Qi, they all agreed, was too beautiful to disguise. “Such fat cheeks, very easy for the facial recognition program!”
It struck Fred that although professional security agents could be made too frightened to hold on to Qi, these ordinary young people were willing to shelter her. Surely they too would get in trouble if found with her. Maybe it was the difference between helping her and holding her, but he wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t seem like a good idea to ask about it, and in fact their frequent nervous laughter might be covering a certain speediness in them that gave away their fear. They would leave in five hours, they said, as they had made an arrangement with a boat that would drop by the city’s ferry terminal soon after that, and they had the terminal itself rigged for that hour. In the meantime, one of them said, with an uncertain look at Qi, their group would like to see her, if she would agree to it. She pursed her lips unhappily, then nodded.
They were led to the back of the room they were in, where a doorway let them out into an airshaft surrounded entirely by ancient brick walls. They descended a metal spiral staircase into dimness. There was scarcely room to fit between the central pole and the spiraling outer rail of these stairs, and the steps were triangles where even the outermost section was barely big enough to hold a shoe. Fred followed Qi down, feeling blinder and blinder as they dropped. It seemed to him as if they were descending many more floors than they had gone up.
At the bottom of the spiral stair a shaft of light pierced him, and he stumbled into a room. When his eyes adjusted he saw that the room was quite large—a basement storage room, perhaps, about twenty feet high and extending back into shadows some indeterminate distance. Very hard to see all the way, because the room was jammed with people. Fred’s stomach vibrated with the characteristic buzz of a Faraday security cage.
Most of the people in there were standing, others sat on boxes or on the concrete floor. Someone gave a wooden box to Qi, and she took it to one wall and stood on it, and the room went quiet. Everyone stared at her. Faces were rapt. Their expressions reminded Fred suddenly of the musicians by the lake. These people too were flushed and transported.
Qi said something in greeting and many of them smiled and nodded or even said something back. Then she snapped something, in that waspish way Fred was coming to recognize, and it took them aback; they swayed back on their heels, and after that were more rapt than ever.
And then Qi began to talk at speed. Her eyes blazed as she looked around the room, staring at them, her cheeks flushed. She raised a finger, pointed it at them. She was challenging them, Fred thought—but then she spoke even faster and said something that made them laugh, and after that she laughed too, and shifted mode; she was explaining something to them now, telling a story to make a point. Her hands held up her points, chopped them apart, wove them together, handed them over to her listeners. They were about equal numbers of men and women. They looked like they had been working hard that day, like they worked hard every day. They had come into this cellar tired, he saw, and perhaps hungry, but more hungry for her than for food. They could eat later. For now she was their food. Their eyes were devouring her. They were lit, and she was the fire. Fred felt it himself; normally he couldn’t read faces at all, and here he was reading her like a book, even as she spoke in a language he didn’t know. It was very much like hearing that strange orchestra, a deep stab of recognition and longing.
He couldn’t have said how much time passed as she spoke. Half an hour or maybe an hour. He was feeling the weight of Earth, he was hungry, thirsty, sandy-eyed, sick; he should have been sleepy; but he was transfixed. He was a little curious to know what she was saying, but then again, while seeing the situation as clearly as he was, her words were irrelevant. They might even have been a distraction. The form of the situation said more than the content. These were poor people, he thought, in a big city. That meant they were probably urban workers. They would certainly already know a lot about whatever Qi was talking about—they owned phones, they lived lives. Suddenly he saw it: everyone knew everything. Of course. How could it be otherwise? This was the world, people knew it. Even he knew it, and he didn’t know anything. So these people weren’t here for knowledge; they already knew. Eyes bright, watching her like hawks, they were hungry for something besides information. They wanted some kind of leverage, some kind of recognition or acknowledgment. Qi was giving them that.
Finally she ended things with a series of jokes. She laughed, they laughed. She promised them things, and made them promise her back. All this was so clear! Even in this singsongy musical language of theirs, so alien to him, with not a single cognate word he could understand, it was perfectly clear, right there on their faces.
She stopped with a little wave and their applause started with a short roar, then quickly ended. She got off the box and walked through the room, touching arms, shaking hands, nodding formally, hugging informally. She was moving, Fred saw suddenly, from woman to woman. She was finding the women in the room and giving them some extra moment of female solidarity, while always listening to whatever any of them said to her. The men could watch, that was all they needed to do now. They saw this on her face and stayed clear and watched, eyes gleaming. She got to choose who spoke to her.
This went on for another fifteen or twenty minutes, then her friends were guiding her toward the door, and Fred followed. Back on the narrow metal spiral staircase, climbing through the gloom between the walls. The weight of the world made Fred sweat and gasp as he lifted his feet and found the little triangles of corrugated steel, step after step. By the time they got back up to the room they had been in before, he felt utterly wasted. His head was swimming.
And yet there was no time to rest. They were given turns in a bathroom to shower and relieve themselves, and a young woman went in with Qi, presumably to help her get the cut on her back bandaged properly. Lots of laughter in there as they worked on that. A young man sitting next to Fred gave him an inquiring look, but Fred just shrugged. In the state he was in, Qi was far beyond his ability to explain, in any language except for that shrug.