“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.