She came out looking refreshed. They dressed her with a hat, wig, sunglasses, and a nighttime mouth guard. Fred they gave a baseball hat with a Yankees logo on it (his brother would be appalled) and another mouth guard, which he bit down on uneasily. It didn’t fit.
Downstairs on the crowded street, four of them jammed onto an electric cart meant for two and zipped out onto a larger street, into the city proper, into a traffic jam. It seemed to Fred they were headed south again, although in a city as twisted as this one it was impossible to stay oriented; it was just a feeling he had. It seemed to be midafternoon.
They rounded a turn and a giant building came into view, half of it hanging over the water of a hill-circled bay. The ferry terminal, it appeared. It had a big triangular roof slanting up and out over the water. Its sides were covered by irregular metal circles, like bubbles of sea-foam, painted in colors that shifted as they got higher, from yellow to maroon to orange to blue.
The interior of this terminal turned out to be almost entirely a single giant room. Everything was built of either concrete or steel, both corroded by salt, so that like all the rest of the city, it looked both new and old at the same time. There were turnstiles as in a subway station, and also customs gates, as if they were at a border. But the gates were empty, and the turnstiles turned freely. Fred was curious about that, but he didn’t want to say anything aloud.
Then they were showing their wristpads to a pair of terminal employees, after which they descended stairs to a dock right at water level. On the other side of the terminal, a ferry as long as the building was being boarded by people on a higher floor, over a gangplank that was at least two stories off the water. They, however, stepped right onto a small boat with only a dozen seats, set on a single deck with a wooden roof and walled by salty glass, behind a wheelhouse where two women ran the craft. As soon as they were on board, joining what looked like a single group of other passengers, the boat cast off and grumbled away.
Fred turned and looked back. Palm trees bracketed the gigantic ferry terminal. Their boat’s top speed was putteringly slow. Late-afternoon sun glazed the air, and there was so much salt crusting the boat’s windows that they could see little more than impressionist shapes to the sides: other boats, either anchored or moving; a container ship in the distance; a lot of construction cranes on the shore they were leaving; jets taking off and landing at what had to be an airport, somewhere behind the buildings; green hills behind, lush with foliage, too steep to be built on. And then, as they motored beyond a building-filled promontory on the left, a city. A big city: like New York, or Oz, or Cosmopolis.
Fred felt his mouth hanging open, and closed it. More skyscrapers than he’d ever seen in his life were bunched on both sides of a crowded strip of water. Above the far side of this clutch of skyscrapers, green peaks reared toward the sky, towering three or four times higher than the tallest buildings. On the tops of these green peaks stood more buildings.
Their boat passed to the west of this harbor city and continued around a point, headed south. Ahead of them lay an island, considerably lower than the high ridge backing the city, but equally green.
The boat drew up to a small concrete dock protruding into a little bay indenting the island. Behind the dock a village terraced the hill overlooking the bay. The water was still. The buildings were salt-chewed concrete blocks, as in Shekou, but the tallest buildings here were only three stories, each floor stepped back so that a balcony terrace overlooked the street. There were no vehicles except for a couple of small carts there on the corniche behind the dock. People were either on foot or riding bicycles. Palm trees, broad-leafed trees; Fred was unfamiliar with the foliage, but it reminded him of photos of Hawaii or places like that. The buildings looked like beach resorts in tourist brochures, but tackier. Fred saw quite a few Westerners walking the corniche, or sitting in the many open-air cafés. He didn’t know what to make of that. He heard English being spoken in the cafés they passed and kept his mouth shut. It was no trouble to look ignorant and confused.
They walked up a sidewalk that left the little harbor, and followed the sidewalk over a low hill, walking for half an hour to another harbor on the other side of the little island, where an even smaller village was built around a bay deeper than the first one. A variety of boats, including even some classic old-fashioned junks, were anchored next to a stretch of water roped off between buoys, possibly because it was filled with aquaculture pens; he could see little flags and metal rails just sticking out of the water. The concrete buildings around this little bay were shabbier even than those on the side the ferry had docked at.
The sidewalk that had crossed the island led them past a little cave where an old sign in English and Chinese explained that Japanese soldiers had hid in it during a war. Then down to the little harbor, which was faced by a line of open-walled restaurants that shared a single long awning roof. They approached a two-story concrete box near these restaurants, some kind of large cubical bungalow, it seemed. Qi’s friends unlocked a door painted green and they hurried inside and upstairs to the second floor, where the main room’s window overlooked the little bay and its scattering of boats.
“Okay,” Qi said to Fred as she looked around the room. “We’re here.”
“What here?” Fred asked. “What was that big city we passed?”
“Hong Kong!” she said, staring at him. “And this is Hong Kong too, for that matter.”
“Lamma Island,” one of their young companions explained. “One of Hong Kong’s outer islands.”
“It’s a good place to hide,” Qi said to Fred after they sat down heavily on worn-out rattan couches and armchairs placed in the middle of the little room. “This place is owned by friends. It’s usually a rental apartment for tourists, so lots of different people come and go, and sometimes it’s empty. So we can hide here for a while, until I figure out what to do next.”
“Okay,” Fred said, as if he had any choice in the matter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
fu nu neng ding ban bian tian
Women Hold Up Half the Sky (Mao)
At the Bayan Nur spaceport, after Ta Shu watched Fred and Chan Qi being escorted away through a security door, he went and spoke to a group of security officers still standing there.
“Those are friends of mine, what are you doing with them?”
“They’re being taken for questioning.”
“I’m going to send their lawyers to help them, where should I direct those lawyers?”
The security guards conferred among themselves, made a couple of calls. Then: “Ministry of Public Security, Beijing. Inquire there.”
“Thanks for that.”
Ta Shu left the spaceport very worried. He tried to see the pattern, but there was too little he knew about the middle ground. That vast space between the thread of events he had witnessed and the great tapestry of the overarching landscape was like the clouds of mist that floated between the tiny travelers at the bottom of a painting and the distant peaks at the top. He needed to talk to people in Beijing. One person in particular, of course.
He went back inside and found that a flight left for the capital in an hour. He bought a ticket, waited for departure, got on a jet, sat in it as it took off and headed east.